Another night with the opportunity to take some images. The day was clear and beeing optimistic, I put my RC8 telescope on my EQ6-R mount. I never got this thing working as I wanted it to work. So for about an hour after darkness, I did some tests on M81. Frustration... again! Then I decided to put on my 8" Newt to save the rest of the night. But I was not prepared well for this focal length. Stellarium told me, that there wasn't much stuff in the direction I could point the scope to. So I decided to go for a complete new route this time. I decided to take an image of M44. How hard could this be? It is just a simple star cluster...

The first thing I realized, was a very poor guiding. But I did a good polar alignment and some days ago, all went well. I tried to keep the guiding under an arcsec. Although I was "kind of" successful, I was not happy with the result. The temperature sensor showed -5°C and the air was a bit foggy. But the Guide scope of my RC worked much better some minutes ago. Maybe a bad balance? I may have to switch the guide cameras next time. It should make a difference between the GPCam 3 178M and the ASI 120MM.

OK, so the first image looked not too bad. I put together a sequence in NINA and guess what? I forgot the set the Binning to a matching value. So I took the L images with binning 2 and the RGB images with Binning 1. Of course, I realized this while trying to process the final image the day after the photo session. I also took a closer look at the sharpness of the data. While it looked sharp in the preview mode, the 1:1 view was really not that great. The spikes from the Stars look like they are split in two. Thats strange. I never realized this issue. I had to check the collimation again. Maybe, that is the reason for this.

I never took photos of simple stars before. I looked around, found some sample images and decided to go for an exposure time of two minutes. With Binning 1, this was not a bad decision. But with Binning 2, the luminance images showed overexposed stars. Because the night is over now, I can't change something to save the data. So I have to live with what I got...

The image processing was quite difficult. I forgot to make flats for binnig 1 and so I was not able to correct the RGB data. I still have some color fringes that are split. One side of a star is red, the other side is blue. Also an issue of bad collimation? The binning of 2 led to more sensitive pixels (I know - in theory). So the big stars are bloated. The beautiful yellow and blue color contrast of the stars of the cluster is (of course) not visible with this kind of data. 

I could go on for hours...

Honestly, I need some real help with my equipment. Someone who knows what he is doing. All the effort I put into my rig always leads to frustration. I thought I understand the theory behind all this stuff. Maybe I did not.

But nevertheless, I decided to upload the image. It should remind me (and maybe you) to do my/your homework and to optimize the rig. I could not understand, how clear some of the images from other users are, that basically use the same equipment as me. You lucky people!

But there is something in my image that looks quite pleasing - there are beautiful star spikes! They must be beautiful, otherwise this image is trash...