One of my first Mono projects is finally done for this season.
This project threw countless roadblocks my way and it took all the knowledge I gathered in the past nine months to overcome them.
- The first night I shot 4 hours worth of data in Oiii at the ideal FOV angle of 34° but for some stupid reason accidentally rotated the image train a whole 10° while taking flats. I noticed it after shooting even more data the second night. I had to choose which session to keep and decided by evaluating the data. Since the 25° subs were superior, I kept this angle and went on. This is why the Ha region is not perfectly aligned in the frame.
- I had to deal with super spontaneous fog that appeared within minutes and stayed for hours ruining entire nights that were supposed to be clear and nice.
- Flat calibration of my Oiii subs turned out to be quite difficult. I had to introduce a pedestal that reduces the overall contrast to counter the over-correction in the stacked master light frame.
- Due to the super low signal in Oiii anywhere aside from the actual squid itself, I struggled with a bad weave pattern that became apparent after noise reduction in stretching that ruined the image. After some discussion with PI mastermind Juan I was able to fix it using bilinear interpolation during StarAlignment with a subsequent drizzle integration. That meant to drizzle hundreds of subs which was quite a hassle
- After devoting so many nights to the this target, I wanted to get RGB subs for stars as well and that's when the weather decided to leave me hanging.
In the end I was able to pull a decent result from the roughly 30 hours of data. It is definitely an improvement to my OSC version at 20 hours and that is want I wanted to see.
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