It was the first clear night since the last session on Nov 3rd.   I wanted to see this comet and try to get images of the Heart Nebula.  The comet was first in line since it was already getting low in the west after sundown.    I forgot to adjust the gain down and shot it at the highest gain setting I usually use when focusing and star aligning.  Surprisingly, I was able to salvage the sub-images and get a usable image from them.   BTW, the comet seems to have a tail, but it could be an artifact of the gain setting or something.

Next up, I did a quick look see at M42 and the M46/M47 Open clusters area.   I wasn’t planning on keeping these, but the data on my main target of the night, the Heart Nebula, was horrible.  So, I thought better of just ditching these sub-images.

I also did a short run on the Cone Nebula/Christmas Tree Cluster area of 10 x 3 minutes, plus I got a few frames of M78 and M44.   The Cone area is not too bad considering it is only 30 minutes of time.  M44 was a very quick look and I just wanted to see how it would fit with this rig I was using.   But, M78 needs a couple of hours to even begin to look nice and I only got 21 minutes worth.  Oh, well… next time.

And, finally, here is the salvage job on the Heart Nebula, of which I had two sets of data.  One was slightly out of focus, the other had a terrible gradient from an IR source that was pointed right at the lens and I think some of it got through the UHC-S filter, or it was a reflection off the front glass.

What I ended up doing is taking the slightly out of focus stars and removing them totally, then taking the good stars from the data that had the bad gradient and combining them.   Still noisy and not that great, but reducing it to 33% smoothed it out enough to pass as a display image.

Oh, well.  Another reshoot for this one is in order and also for its close neighbor, the Soul Nebula.

It was a Friday night, March 3rd/4th, clear and cool.  The Moon was out at 83% full.  So, I thought it would be a perfect night to test the Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter in moonlight conditions to see how bad that would affect it and to get an update on how Comet C/2022 E3 was doing.

Well, the comet’s photogenic appearance has diminished quite a bit since I last imaged it in mid-February.  The filter I used probably attenuated the brightness, but by the size in this full field image you can see the comet is much further away from us and receding into the distance fast.  Oh, well.  It was fun while it lasted.

Next up, I did some EAA-type imaging to test short exposures with the filter on a bright object like M42.   It worked pretty good for such a short time (83×15 sec or 20 minutes) of exposure.   But, it would need quadruple that time to get right and I was more interested on using longer exposures that would bring out dimmer nebulae better.

So, I switched to the nearby Horse Head Nebula and Flame to test the filter with one minute exposures.  I refocused first since M42 looked out of focus and glad I did since it was way off.

The Horse Head and Flame were a better choice for the amount of moonlight out and a better test of the filter’s ability to pick up H-Alpha nebula light.   I thought it came out good for only 40 subs:

When Orion and all the good objects there got out of position and got into the power lines, I moved further east to get more of the Rosette Nebula, which I imaged a few weeks prior.  It was also closer to the moon and had a strong gradient due to moonlight and the vignetting my imaging train has.  I managed to minimize it in post processing, but it was not exactly easy.    After processing, this is the 60 x 60 sec of exposure with the Triband filter I managed to get:

I combined that with the data I previously had that was taken with just a clear UV/IR cut filter:

Not too bad of a mixture.  After these runs, I moved to the east and tried imaging a few things there, but the moonlight and LP on that side was more than what the filter could deal with, it seems.

I imaged M101, but the gradient was severe and the image was very difficult to flatten all of that gradient out and preserve the dim areas.   By the time I got rid of it all, the colors were drained out and no amount of saturation adjustments were going to bring them back.

So, tried my luck on the M13 Globular Cluster, which was a good test for the Antlia.   Still had a strong gradient to deal with, but since it has no nebula parts, it was much easier to get rid of:

Normally I avoid doing anything on Friday the 13th.  lol.  But, since astronomical time is Greenwich Mean Time, the 13th ended at 6:00PM CST, so I was good.  Ha!

I imaged 3 objects this night. One was the object above, the Orion Nebula (and friends,) one was the Flaming Star Nebula and I shot about 2.5 hours of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF.)

Equipment used was an Askar 180mm F.L., F/4.5 scope (40mm objective,) an Astronomic L-3 UV/IR filter and a QHY183c camera, and an Atlas EQ-G with EQMOD.

Here’s the Flaming Star. I missed the focus on this. I threw away several processing attempts before salvaging what I could for this display image. Oh, well… next time.

Next, after waiting till 2:30-3:00 AM, I took images of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF).   It is small and still kind of dim, but has a long, faint tail.  I have two data sets  with about an hour each of exposure.