Finally I got a run to complete as designed! Again, a night with a lot of moonlight that was therefore suited to Hα imaging. I've always tried to do the entire Heart Nebula before, but after seeing some nice tighter views on Astrobin I decided to try this framing. I think it's a really interesting region. I'm still seeing some field rotation, undoubtedly because my polar alignment is poor, but not bad enough to ruin the image (and it might have actually helped a little in getting rid of hot pixels). I'd still like to work on improving the off-axis guider focus in hopes of easier guide star acquisition. Finally, I need to get automated refocusing working. It definitely feels like the problems I've been having with image downloads hanging and dropping USB connections must have come from the USB-3 hub/cable, because those issues appear to have gone away.
Date: 12 Nov 2016
Subject: IC 1805, portion of Heart Nebula
Scope: AT8IN+Antares 0.5x focal reducer
Filter: Baader Planetarium 7 nm Hα
Mount: EQ-6 (EQMOD)+PEC
Guiding: Orion TOAG +DSI Ic+PHD 2.6.2.4 (Win 10 ASCOM)hear
Camera: DSI IIc, no chiller CCD ~10 °C
Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro 2.5.2.4 with Nebulosity 4.1.1 ASCOM camera driver (Win 10)
Exposure: 42x600 s
Stacking: Neb 4.1.1, bad pixel map, bias included, 33 flats, match histograms, trans+rot align, Deep Sky Stacker 1.5σ κ-σ stack.
Processing: StarTools 1.4.316: Crop; Develop: 68.54%; HDR
ptimize; Deconvolute: 5.1 pix; Track: Smoothness 75%, 4.5 pix. Photoshop CS6 + Astronomy Tools: Curves; layer-masked local contrast enhance; less crunchy more fuzzy; layer masked unsharp mask; Astroframe.
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