Messier 20 has always been one of my favorite deep sky objects and one of those targets I've been trying to do well since I first started out back in 2016. My very first attempt at this involved traveling to my uncle's house (about two months after starting my DSO imaging journey using a DSLR) since he had a nice view of the southern sky. Due to inexperience, I was unable to find it in the sky and ended up instead with a
really bad image of M17 (my oldest DSO image still on my wall). My second and third attempts were both shot with a refractor and color camera at my parents' place in NJ - I used a refractor because it still fit in my car with the rest of our luggage and I used a color camera because of the lower levels of light pollution, the overall brightness of the target and inability to give the target more than one night. Both efforts (see
here for effort 2) were kind of doomed from the start because of the low integration time (it's also a target that I always thought would look better with my 8" Newt anyway). I viewed both images as a placeholder until I could nab it with the 8" Newt.
Late last summer, my neighbor across the street took down two trees facing the south. As a result, I went from being able to grab 75 minutes of data on M20 per night to about 3.5 hours, so I finally gave this 'bucket list' target a real effort using the gear I always wanted to shoot it with. While I still didn't grab all the data I intended to before traveling (I was really planning on at least shooting some Ha), I did get enough data to process this image. If anyone has constructive criticism, I'm all ears. I'm still feeling a little out of practice and ended up processing this, then trashing it and stacking from scratch before trying again.
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