The Corona Australis Nebula

First light with Sharpstar z4. Location Bortle 6 suburban

 

30 x 1 minute exposures plus 30 x 5 minute exposures

 

Gain 117 offset 5

 

Equipment

 

EQ6 Pro/Sharpstar Z4/Optolong L Pro/ZWO ASI 183 MC

 

Software

NINA/Astro Pixel Processor/ Photoshop CS6/Topaz AI/NoiseXterminator/ Starnet ++ v2

 

processing notes

 

Short exposures stacked and registered with long exposure stack; star layer extracted

 

longer exposures stacked and registered with short exposure; starless layer created, noise removed and stretched

 

Star layer from short exposure added in at 80 % opacity to reduce intensity

 

Final noise reduction with NoiseXterminator at 70 %

 

Issues

 

focus very soft. some artifacts around stars- is this due to the Lpro? optical train? Gain too high?

 

many stars are saturated so very possible gain was too high for this configuration;

focus definitely needs improvement

 

Also seeing (and transparency) on the night was execrable

 

CCD inspector in ASTAP showed no tilt, unroundness of 1.1 (in general) and no aberration so that's the good news

Done