This was in a slightly light polluted zone of my generally dark (~Bortle 4) sky. I had a couple of "firsts" with this one, besides it being my first time imaging this object. The first "first" was, the scope had to do a meridian flip. I've not done that before and don't like the idea of having to, but had no choice. Thankfully the pointing accuracy of my CGX mount worked great. Fortunately I discovered that DeepSkyStacker processes the batch of images as if they're all in the same orientation and I didn't have to manually flip them 180° like I thought I would.
The next "first" was I used 20 bias frames. They're certainly easy to take, and I should have been using them before. They did help.
I discarded probably 20 light frames in total (a couple of hours worth
) due to either tracking errors (an occasional hiccup sometimes due to chasing seeing), satellite tracks, or other issues like puffs of wind that affected tracking and caused elongated stars. This hobby is Murphy's Law to the max!
Useable light frames included:
43 subs x 240 seconds @ ISO 800
10 subs x 180 sec. @ ISO 3200
Bias: 20 x 1/4000 sec. @ ISO 800
Dates: 8-12 May, 2023
Combined all in DSS, then processed in LightRoom and PhotoShop.
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