The Image

A very bright, almost full moon accompanied a couple of partly clear nights last week, not ideal but you've got to take the opportunities as they come.

Surprisingly there aren't too many images on Astrobin with this sort of FOV. Most are either close ups of the different nebula in this region or much wider fields of Cepheus. However, one great image I did find and one I really liked was this image by @Ivan Raichev

Given the conditions I'm pretty pleased and I enjoyed the processing on this one, even with the tricky gradients. We're spoilt with tools like GraXpert which makes gradient removal the easiest it has ever been. Stretching with GHS really made a difference on this one and I was surprised how much was there even though it was imaged under a bright moon. 

I also shot some unfiltered data for the stars, replacing my narrowband stars for something with a bit more colour. 


Other Stuff

For a few images now I've noticed the stars in some of my corners were not as sharp as those in the centre. To be honest it's always been there and I suspected it might be tilt, I've known my 2600MC comes with a built in tilt plate but it hasn't been until now that I've had the confidence to fiddle with things. Another sign of something wrong was that my flats have been much darker on one edge, turns out that dark side seemed to corresponded to what I discovered when I looked into things. I finally decided to take a look and do a bit of research as I really wasn't happy with the stars across the whole frame.

I downloaded ASTAP and a free trial of CCD Inspector to see what I could find. It turns out I had pretty bad curvature and tilt. A few YouTube videos and a couple hours of adjustments later I managed to improve things.

The image on the left is where it started and the right is where I got it to. 


I don't think it's quite perfect but my stars are now much better across the whole frame. 

Thanks for looking and clear skies all