This image is first light for Sunflower Ranch. It is the Tadpoles of IC410.

This is the first image from our new property north of Ellensburg, WA. We've moved here from the Seattle area since retiring last year. The property is 40 acres, about 10 miles south of the original Table Mountain Star Party site. Many of the properties around here have names. My wife has decided to have a sunflower theme in the house, so we are calling the property Sunflower Ranch.

This is also first light for my EdgeHD at F/10. Up until now, I have been imaging at F/7 with the dedicated Celestron reducer. I have been a bit unhappy with the quality of the stars in the corners, especially in the blue channel. Since we are coming into galaxy season, where I will want long focal length, I've removed the reducer and am now running the EdgeHD at F/10.

Finally, this was first light for a new software stack. I've been using SGP for a few years now, but have been interested in NINA for a while. With the change of location and telescope configuration, this seemed like a good time to rework the software stack as well. So this is also first light for using NINA for image acquisition.

The conditions tonight were moderate, with somewhat poor transparency and a waning gibbous moon. Seeing was average. Still, it was the first full, cloudless night that we've had since setting up the gear in January.

The image is a monochrome, H-Alpha shot. The forecast is for increasing clouds for the next week, so I didn't want to take a dependency on color data. The image scale is 0.37 arc second per pixel.

Processing is minimal and was done with PixSight. The steps were as follows:

ImageCalibration

CosmeticCorrection

SubframeSelector

StarAlignment

ImageIntegration

DynamicCrop

MureDenoise

HistorgramTransformation

HDRMultiscaleTransform (50% blend with original via PixelMath)

Capture details were as follows.

Mount: Astro-Physics AP1600GTO CP4 with Absolute Encoders

Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 8 @ F/10

Camera: QSI 690wsg-8

Filters: Astrodon Ha, 3nm

Exposures: 12x900 seconds