June 12th, 2016 – Lagoon Nebula (M8) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region. The star-forming nebula has an apparent magnitude of 6.0 and lies at a distance of 4,100 light years from Earth. It has the designation NGC 6523 in the New General Catalogue.

When I began with astrophotography I started with Canon SL1 which was back then the smallest APS-C canon sensor which was convenient with Hyperstar as it won’t block a big area in front of the corrector plate. With that said I was having lots of issues with noise and I really wanted a camera that stay cool also I was fascinated with all the images that I see on the web that has more contrast and beautiful colors which they call it Hubble Palette and shot using narrowband filters, which was for me a huge learning curve.

I knew that means I need an astro-camera and set of filters and I was debating because I didn’t like the idea that most astro-cameras are very expensive and the idea of capturing three times (RGB) or (Ha, OIII, SII) filter for each object which means more time and many things might go wrong … etc

On May 26th, 2016, I finally pulled the trigger and purchased (ZWO ASI1600MM-cooled) camera and a set of Astronomik 2” (LRGB) and (Ha, OIII, SII) (12nm) and I got the proper adapter and filter slider from Starizona for my Hyperstar to connect the ZWO and 2” filters.

I was learning new thing every night (I still do), the more I used this setup I realized that I needed to upgrade, so I purchased (Sequence Generator Pro) for capturing, guide, focus and plate solving and I also made few DIY stuff to make life much easier, (Remote focuser), (Bahtinov focus mask) to help me with focusing, (hyperstar circular degree tape) to help me with field rotation, (PixInsight) for image stacking and processing.

Now the results of this upgrade was breathtaking, I can’t explain how happy I am by the details and clean data from the cooled camera, using filter system and mono camera give you lots of flexibility, great sensitivity and frames with much better signal to noise ratio.