3hrs of exposure for this nice edge-on galaxy. It got cloudy towards the end of the run and there was a serious guiding error on the full 61×180 sec stack. But, I managed to salvage the stack by copying the background and galaxy and pasting that in as a lightened blend on top of a 47×180 sec saved stack for the stars that did not have a guiding error. Lucky I saved it before it got ruined.
Here is a closer crop with a saturation boost:
Another Black Eye galaxy shot to add to my collection. Not quite the guiding I was getting earlier in the evening, but it is not too bad, either. Minimal processing done to this one.
I was having a good night of steady seeing and really good guiding (<1.13 arc sec error) for this object and the Pleiades on this night. I went until it was time to flip and the guiding was starting to degrade. 78 minutes worth of subs was good enough to show this object well.
Not too bad for a session from the metro LP zone! Only 96 minutes, but it was enough with these settings to show quite a bit of nebulousity. I used the unity gain setting (11) and that made a big difference in hot pixels and noise. My other shots at a gain of 20 were plagued by hot pixels that SharpCap 3.2 doesn’t seem to be able to deal with very well. I like this much better and there is just as much data buried in there as in the higher gain shots.
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 12 best images of 2020 roughly in a monthly order, Jan to Dec.
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.
