My first attempt to capture one of the most beautiful DSOs: the Cygnus loop.
The nights were already quite short when capturing this object, so I could not get much exposure time.
Unfortunately, two issues caused further delays.
First, about 20 baby spiders fell in love with the scope while it was unattended after building up the equipment and waiting for the night.
So things needed some cleaning from spiders and their webs before the session could start.
After everything was set up again and the autofocus routine started, I noticed that the toothed belt pulley of the EAF adapter for the FMA230 broke. So fallback to manual focus was necessary.
For postprocessing (Siril and Starnet++), the following steps were taken:
- Per channel: calibration, registration, stacking
- Common registration (alignment) of the resulting Ha and O-III images
- Per channel: BG extraction and star removal
- Linear match of starless O-III to starless Ha (equal brightness levels)
- RGB composition of the two starless images (R,G,B=Ha,O-III,O-III)
- RGB conversion of the starmask from Ha (R,G,B=Ha,Ha,Ha)
- Stretching of both RGB images
- Denoise of RGB composition
- Merging RGB composition with RGB starmask using pixel math (~(~StarMask * ~Starless))
This was my first session in the field with the Askar FMA230. I'm quite happy with the telescope in combination with an APS-C sensor.
I've replaced the broken (3D printed) toothed belt pully with a metal one, and now autofocus works like a charm.
Please don't ask me why I used gain 50. I studied the necessary details of the ASI2600MM after this session.
Depending on the required FW capacity, I would now use either gain 100 ("HCG mode") or (if I need a higher FW capacity) gain 0.
Comments