This was a tough image to process as the data was of such poor quality when I was scanning through the subs for errors. It is extremely noisy and out of 6 hours of data captured, only 1.5 hours were usable due to terrible tracking. My rig is just getting too old now and it was never really designed for tracking at these focal lengths.
Having said that, I'm relatively happy with this final image for such short subs and an uncooled DSLR. The image is still very noisy, if I had used enough noise reduction to get rid of it all, then there would be 0 sharpness left in the DSO. There is still some detail in the fainter tidal tails that I want expecting to get with such short subs, so I'm quite pleased with that.
Overall, the experiment was worth it, just to see what I could do with this setup. I think I will be going back to my short focal length refractors pretty quickly though.
Thanks, Ed
Acquisition Equipment
Camera - CANON EOS 60D (Mod)
Filter - Astronomik CLS-CCD EOS Clip
Telescope - SkyWatcher 80ED / C9.25 SCT
Reducer/Flattener - 0.85x / 0.63x
Focal Length - 510mm / 1480mm
F Ratio - F6.3
Mount - Celestron CG-5 Adv GT GEM
Guide Scope - Celestron 9x50
Guide Camera - QHY 5 Mono
Image Capture
ISO - 1600
45 X 120 sec = 1hr 30mins
100 x Dark frames
100 x Bias frames
50 x Flat frames
50 x Dark Flat frames
Acquisition Software
Capture/Sequence - N.I.N.A.
Plate Solving - ASTAP
Guiding - PHD2
Planetarium - Stellarium
Processing Software
Stacking - DeepSkyStacker
Post - Adobe Photoshop / Camera Raw / StarNet++
Links
https://instagram.com/edholtastrohttps://flickr.com/photos/edholtastrohttps://twitter.com/edholtastrohttps://astrobin.com/users/edholtastro
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