Fifth project with the QHY600 and I still hadn't nailed down the backspacing or even realized I had reflections in my imaging train.
But skies were clear so I kept pressing full speed ahead with data acquisition instead of wasting clear nights to make things perfect. The last time I imaged California, it was an insane 16-panel project (
California Nebula) using my SX694. So being able to do the same field of view with just a single panel using the QHY600 was such a relief.
When I finally got around to processing the data three months after I had capture it, I realized I wasn't happy with the stars. I tossed the SHO stars and squeezed in an hour capturing some RGB stars for the final image seen here. Processing the data took several attempts to finally arrive at something I was content with since the Ha data was so strong compared to the other channels. This made it tough to pull out blue from the O3 data while still holding down all the green from the Ha. I will probably go deeper with the O3 data next time to see if that helps. Overall, the image is a little more saturated than what I typically do, but for me, it looked best this way.
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