I decided on the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) or Apple Core Nebula because it was bright and it was perfectly situated so I could image from my observatory rather than setting up from a different part of my lawn. We have lots of trees so I have to be strategic with imaging. I tried to image from a different location few nights prior but had all sorts of issues and ended up wasted a clear night so I stayed where the equipment is set up. It was a good move as I had more issues but this time I was able to resolve them.

I decided to give SGP another try since some of my issues were a result of APT. I believe I have a curse where software is involved so I ended up using both programs. To make a long story short, APT's live screen frame and focus is not great, in fact I use BYEOS to focus with my Canon 600d, so I set up a sequence in SGP and focused on Vega using a new Bahtinov Mask. I then started the preset sequence with which included a pre-framed M27 using the plate-solving function. I followed Chuck's Astrophotography procedure for this. It worked perfectly - centered right on the object and then... error in starting PHD2! I started PHD2 manually but it froze the whole program so I had to restart my computer. Rather than lose another clear night I quickly set up a plan APT which was all I had to do since I was already focused and centered on it. It worked great, the only other issue I had was in all my fumbling around I forgot to check my temperature. I was planning on doing it at -15 C, however, when I started it was at -1 C. Oh well, the images frames were much less noisy than I anything I have ever done before.

The time of the capture plan happened to correspond perfectly to the visibility of M27. I stacked the frames in PI which aligned everything and did a RGB combination as well as a HaOO combination. I did a little more processing in PI than I did with the California Nebula before doing the final processing in PS. In the end, I added the RGB (25% combine) data to the HaOO data to improve the star color. There is a better way using a star mask but I don't know how to do that, yet!

I am very happy with the final result. The inner nebula with the white dwarf central star is visible and the faint outer nebulosity is visible. Although more OIII data might bring this even more, this is a small object to image with a 80 mm refractor so I think I will wait for a new scope to image this again.