IC1396 - Elephants trunk nebula (Christian Großmann)

IC1396 - Elephants trunk nebula

For some time now, I think about buying an OSC camera, but I was never really convinced if I need it. I thought, maybe it could simplify some things for a different kind of objects. Then I saw a good offer for a used QHY 183c. I use the ZWO 183MM and it fits well with my TS 70/350 APO. So the color version should fit as well. I once bought a Explore Scientific UHC filter, which I never used before. So I gave it a try and took about 20 hours of data. It was really hard to focus and plate solve, because the sensor is so much less sensitive than the mono versions. I never thought the difference is so huge. I am not sure if I enjoyed this experience.

Anyway, I took about 20 hours of 5 minute subs. While stacking the whole data, PI does reject a lot of frames. Only 142 of them were used in the final image. Processing surprisingly took much more time than my usual LRGB Mono frames. Lesson learned...

The result of this first real OSC camera try looks okayish for me. Of course, it looks like HOO data from narrowband sessions I did before. The UHC filter has done its job. But shooting narrowband with an OSC camera is not what I will do in the near future.

Meanwhile, I bought another mono camera with filter wheel and some filters to fit the gap in my equipment better. I will use the OSC camera with my Canon lenses to take widefield images of the night sky. I think, this may be a good use case for this QHY 183c. It was really cheap so nothing to regret or worry about here. It will be used, but not with my usual telescopes...

Image processing is not my favorite thing in the world. So I will try to improve my mono techniques first and leave the OSC data as it is for now. I do upload the data, because it is part of my work and it is what it is. And the subs themselves are not that bad, I guess.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8649842
PixInsight job	TVKF5ZPZSSGZGADT3VNSG7Q1KIKY6AXR
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	21h34m42s.50
RA (top/left)	21h42m30s.48
RA (top/right)	21h42m53s.99
RA (bottom/right)	21h26m36s.11
RA (bottom/left)	21h26m49s.18

Dec (center)	+57°28′26″.6
Dec (top/left)	+56°44′32″.9
Dec (top/right)	+58°09′22″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+58°10′25″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+56°45′36″.2

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