I was collecting RGB stars for some nebulae I was imaging during a rather bright moonlit night, and this was close to zenith so I thought I'd give it another shot, but with my new ASI533MC Pro. I had imaged this target a few times before,
the last time with my then-recently-modified DSLR, and while it's hard to tell how much of the improvement can be attributed to better equipment (mount & cooled camera) or processing, I'm happy with the result. More stars, more colour, rounder and tighter.
I leveraged a 2x drizzle when processing this, as well as the recently-updated BlurXterminator. Bill Blanshan's star reduction script also helped reduce some of the star bloat (conditions were poor). I removed some of the chromatic fringing in Photoshop, which was pretty bad on the brighter stars even at the centre of the frame. I also accidentally mislaid most of my dark frames (I think I had 6) but it didn't seem to make a lick of difference, the ASI533 has such low noise and I'd dithered every 4 x 45s subs. I tossed all subs with FWHM values greater than 3px.
NGC 884 & 869 are about 7,500ly away from us, and curiously enough are blueshifted - moving towards us. In addition to imaging, they are a real treat for visual astronomy, too!
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