djlr_astro
IC1318 - Butterfly Nebula
Quick summary:
Roughly 9 hours integration with the Optolong L-Enhance and 1 hour with an Astronomik UV/IR cut filter, giving about 10 hours in total.
All sub-exposures were at ISO 1600 and at 180 seconds.
Bortle 6/7 skies in SW England.
With nights in the UK being so short at this time of year, I thought I'd go after a relatively bright target to make the most of the 3-or-so hours of darkness a clear night provides.
For something different, I decided to try and use a UV-IR cut filter to add in RGB stars, I think I turned out quite nicely so I'll definitely repeat this for future targets. The plan was to get 2 hours of integration for RGB stars however clouds and Starlink satellites meant I had to get rid of almost half of those subs!
This target was also plagued by software problems, my ASIAir+ encountered two mandatory firmware updates that seriously effected the capture of the subs. The first update meant the Sky Safari app wouldn't recognise the camera rotation to match a previous night's session (I'd since tore down the rig to mess with things) so I had to eyeball the rotation meaning some heavy cropping had to be done once the subs were stacked. The second update caused my focuser to not be recognised and it's seemingly disabled one of the USB2.0 ports (the one the focuser was in). As such, I've now invested in a Mele Quieter 4C mini-PC and will be moving over to NINA so I can have full control of the rig and also not be locked into ZWO products - I'm excited to give this a go!
IC1318 - Butterfly Nebula
Quick summary:
Roughly 9 hours integration with the Optolong L-Enhance and 1 hour with an Astronomik UV/IR cut filter, giving about 10 hours in total.
All sub-exposures were at ISO 1600 and at 180 seconds.
Bortle 6/7 skies in SW England.
With nights in the UK being so short at this time of year, I thought I'd go after a relatively bright target to make the most of the 3-or-so hours of darkness a clear night provides.
For something different, I decided to try and use a UV-IR cut filter to add in RGB stars, I think I turned out quite nicely so I'll definitely repeat this for future targets. The plan was to get 2 hours of integration for RGB stars however clouds and Starlink satellites meant I had to get rid of almost half of those subs!
This target was also plagued by software problems, my ASIAir+ encountered two mandatory firmware updates that seriously effected the capture of the subs. The first update meant the Sky Safari app wouldn't recognise the camera rotation to match a previous night's session (I'd since tore down the rig to mess with things) so I had to eyeball the rotation meaning some heavy cropping had to be done once the subs were stacked. The second update caused my focuser to not be recognised and it's seemingly disabled one of the USB2.0 ports (the one the focuser was in). As such, I've now invested in a Mele Quieter 4C mini-PC and will be moving over to NINA so I can have full control of the rig and also not be locked into ZWO products - I'm excited to give this a go!