M1, first stage, Hα -> second stage, L(Hα)-Hα-SII-SII (Uwe Deutermann)

M1, first stage, Hα -> second stage, L(Hα)-Hα-SII-SII

I decided to stay with the achromat 6" refractor for a few more images, and what better than M1 to image, especially with the moon high up and shining brightly! Tonight is another clear night, but unfortunately it is so close to M1 that an OIII image is probably a bad decision, hence I skipped it for tonight. But I could not resist to process the Hα portion already. I got almost 7 hours of data, that was nice, since I finally could do the meridian flip automatically (I have to work through daylight, hence I cannot get up every night to do this manually). Big thanks again to John Travis, he helped me already so many times that I can probably never return the favor. And soon his rig is ready again and you can enjoy his most wonderful images!

So if you want to do the meridian flip automatically (with automatic guiding in PHD), here it is (a lot of people know that probably already, this is for everybody else):

I use Sequence Generator Pro (SGP) and PHD.

In SGP go to the Equipment Profile Manager and go to your current setup (let me know if you need information about this).

Go to the AutoGuide tab and select PHD as interface.

Experiment with the other settings, I use 0.5 pixels for settling, and I definitely avoid checking the dither, PHD does that on its own.

Go to the Telescope tab and go to the Auto Meridian Flip Set. Check Auto center after Meridian Flip.

That was all ... and it did it wonderfully with guiding starting up automatically after the meridian flip.

The better the mount is, the better it will work, so do not be disappointed if this is not working so easily. Do some dry runs with targets close to the meridian, and watch how it works.

Hope I could help some people!

Original
B
C
D
Final
E

B

Description: Crop for version 1 overlay.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: This image was obtained by using Topaz Denoise and some slight star reduction from the raw stacked file! While I like the denoising part I am so far not happy with the star handling by Topaz, will need to see how I can apply a mask (which you can), that should improve them.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: More trials with Topaz, using a "mask", have to read up on this, seemed to be very strange how this was applied.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: Was able to get a few SII data last night (finally, although stopped by clouds) and could not resist to create a Lum(H)-H-S-S image out of it just to see what it looks like. Actually ... I love the colors that came out of that!

Uploaded: ...

ZWO ASI1600MM/QHY163M
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4006010
PixInsight job	3KNCWCLDL8JBO1GMLWMGRN39NVDBP8ZZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	05h34m32s.740
RA (top/left)	05h34m29s.566
RA (top/right)	05h35m12s.187
RA (bottom/right)	05h34m34s.493
RA (bottom/left)	05h33m51s.853

Dec (center)	+22°01′02″.36
Dec (top/left)	+21°51′46″.00
Dec (top/right)	+22°01′20″.80
Dec (bottom/right)	+22°10′21″.58
Dec (bottom/left)	+22°00′46″.62

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