Late last night I made a last minute decision to setup for a couple of hours since the sky was clear for once. Couldn't stay up too long, but managed to setup the Meade 5000/80 to try for NGC7000. Setup the mount, scope, camera/OAG/FW, eyeball polar align through polarscope, goto aligned with MaximDL/EQMOD/Gamepad, adjusted focus with a mask, calibrated PHD, and was ready to go in about 40 min (its all in the preparation!).
This is 11x360s through a Ha filter, with 30 flats, no bias or darks. The equipment was Meade 5000/80 on EQ6, TV0.8FR, SX(OAG+Lodestar+FW+H16). Processed in PS, produced a red and grey version, not sure which is best. Thanks for looking.
But 6 minutes is too short for narrowband imaging. As a result your image is a tad noisy. I suggest 15 minutes for Ha as a minimum (as long as your tracking acurracy allows it). The problem with narrowband filters is the camera has the same noise floor as usual but now you have far less signal being recorded to get above the noise floor in order to achieve an image. Longer exposures compensates for that and that is why narrowband imagers go for the highest QE and lowest noise camera and use 15-30 minute subexposure times.
There is some distortion around some stars in the Ha black and white. Did you use the minimum filter? Or deconvolution or some sort of sharpening?
Thanks for your comments, it all helps to improve. My sub length was limited I think by poor polar alignment. I set up rather quickly and polar aligned by eye through the EQ6 polar scope and 'judged' whether it was at 11pm or not (as indicated by the excellent 'polarfinder' app for the iphone). I have managed 10m before using this method, but for longer I think I probably need to drift align. This would eat even longer into my limited observing time. I've not managed to set up the RA & Dec graticules on the mount, so I'm not sure if that would be any more accurate. I think the best solution would be some kind of permanent mount, observatory, etc. I've enclosed my image of NGC2237 with 10m subs.
I did use a high pass filter layer to bring out some detail on both images. The very bright star top left had a couple of horizontal streaks on it (CCD artefact?) that I rather clumsily erased.
