** I've been hosting my images on a WordPress blog for the past 2 years. However, WordPress has recently made it very difficult to share full resolution images, so I decided to upload everything on AstroBin. **

This image has been sitting in my staging area since 2019. Personally, I enjoy the more subtle/natural look of HOO over the SHO version. 
It is the full field of view of this image: 



NGC 7380 - Wizard Nebula


This is the first image that I acquired completely automated, using Sequence Generator Pro (SGP). Up until this project, I’ve always used Astrophotography Tool (APT) for image acquisition, and unfortunately APT did not support in-sequence autofocus back then. SGP had another benefit: it could determine the focus based on the size of all stars in the entire image frame. This means I did not need to stop the sequence, slew to a bright star to focus, and slew back to the target to resume imaging.

I setup SGP to use only the center 50% of the frame because the stars near the edges show too much aberrations (increased HFR). With the stepper motor design of the FocusCube 2, I could also assign filter offsets in software. The driver uses absolute positioning and will automatically move the drawtube a predetermined amount of steps upon filter change. This is useful for color imaging with refractor telescopes, because they focus light of different colors at different distances. For example: the optimal focus of my blue filter differs slightly from the red and green filter focus, despite the triplet apo telescope lens design. In the past, I had to shoot blue separately from red and green in to avoid star bloat in the blue channel. Automated filter offsets make it easier for me to obtain RGB images with optimal sharpness in all color channels. I use the temperature probe on my FocusCube2 to monitor the temperature during imaging, and setup SGP to trigger a new autofocus routine when the temperature changes more than 1 degree Celsius. It took me a while to set everything up, but from this point on I was able to take a relaxing nap while the gear collected photons outside.



Pegasus Astro FocusCube 2 installed on my TS80 apo refractor