I am still working on the Heart Nebula mosiac I started shooting the first few days of the new year. Plenty of work left, but I at least have a more complete image at this point.
Over 4.6 hours of integration with a variety of exposures including 3 min, 2 min and 30 sec sub-images. All were taken with a QHY183c camera at -20C or -15C cooling, an Optolong L-eNhance filter and a Televue TV-85 at F/5.6.
thors-helmet-25×180-g20-o100-lnh-qhy183c_-20C-85f5_6-crop plus thors-helmet-30×120-g20-284×30-g37-o200-lnh-qhy183c_-15C-85f5_6-v2a
The December 26/27 weekend of 2020 was the last imaging session of the year. I managed to bag good data for all the objects on this page. The Heart and Soul Nebulae are still works in progress, though.
I had a little trouble with streetlights and two satellite trails for this shot, but I salvaged what I could. I like the way the 3 minute sub-images are working out, though, now that I’ve tuned the guiding to get usable subs at that exposure setting. That exposure seems to be the sweet-spot for this camera and filter combo at my location.
Below is the image above, but with data add in from my last imaging session of it from a full moon night on Halloween, 2020. I like the way the portrait and landscape versions had diffraction spikes at 90 degrees to each other:
What started out as a quick imaging session to just take a look at this turned into a multi-hour session. I did 3 one hour stacks and one with 45 minutes, with one of those 1 hour stacks shot with the 30 second subs, A nice haul of good data that was easy to process.