It's nice to get back to imaging again! Work and some equipment issues have kept me away for the past two months...

I bought the LPS-D1 filter over the summer to see if I could get more of the yellow color out of broadband objects like galaxies. The CLS-CCD is nice for red emission nebulae, but it always seemed like I lost the natural yellow and orange colors I would see in other photos. I decided to try M33 again with the LPS-D1 filter to see the differences between LPS-D1 and the CLS-CCD (used on M33 11/29/14) - and there were a lot of them.

The first thing I noticed is that for the same 4 minute subs, I exposed to 60% of the histogram with the LPS-D1. With the CLS-CCD, 4 minutes got me much less - maybe 40%, but certainly less than 50%. Also, the extra light was natural and usable - it was not light pollution. More usable light for the same amount of imaging time is very nice and helped bring out more details in the image.

Color calibration in PI was also much easier - I was not fighting to "reduce red" .

To address some balance/tracking issues with the AVX, I set the guidescope to be directly over the imaging scope (e.g. at the 12 o'clock position). Since I use a finderscope as a guide scope (AVX can't handle the weight of a piggyback arrangement), this also forces me to keep the focuser/imaging camera at a fixed position - can't rotate to frame a target a certain way. Autoguiding was great - no issues at all. I even did a 6 minute sub, just to see if I could. It looked good.

That may be just a limitation I have to accept with the AVX, not sure yet, but I am considering buying a new mount (maybe iOptron CEM60) as a Christmas present to myself.

All-star alignment star: Diphda

Display Align results: Azm: 0 deg 0' 0" Alt: 0 deg 01" 47" (my best so far with 80ED scope)

Focus star: Hamal ( 3.2 FWHM in BYE)

Thanks for looking and Happy New Year to all!