We had one, somewhat unexpectedly, clear night last night.  I wanted a good single night target that would be interesting with my wide field setup, and The Pleiades fit the bill.

I've tested some wide field telescopes on this object, but never picked up data that I though was worth processing.  I happened to have my current wide field setup under my cover, so I figured that I'd give it a go for real.

The gear used was a Stellarvue 80mm refractor, with a reducer/flattener making the system F/4.8.  The camera was an ASI2600MC Pro running at gain 100 with a Baader UV/IR cut filter in the Starizona filter changer.  The scope was riding on an AP1600 GTO with Absolute Encoders.  Power distribution, USB hub, dew heater and focus controller were done with a Pegasus Astro Ultimate PowerBox V2.

This is 7 hours of data, comprised of 3 minute exposures.  The system ran unguided, with Astro-Physics APCC Pro using a declination arc tracking model.  The only subs that I rejected were due to either passing clouds or dawn.

Processing was minimally done with PixInsight with the following workflow:

1. Calibration
2. Cosmetic Correction
3. Debayer into separate R, G and B channels
4. Star Alignment with Bicubic B-Spline interpolation (which works well with undersampled data)
5. NormalizeScaleGradient per channel
6. Image Integration with GESD rejection
7. Channel Combination
8. Photometric Color Calibration
9. Non-linear stretch with STF, applied with Histogram Transformation
10. Curves Transformation to bump saturation a bit

I considered using drizzle, but that does not yet work with NormalizeScaleGradient, and I thought that NSG was valuable enough to skip drizzle.  I also had a flat field error that left a slightly bright circle in the lower left of the image, which I cropped almost completely out of the image.  I wanted to do Dynamic Background Extraction, but when I over-stretched the data, there was nebulosity through the entire field, so I could not find suitable sample locations.  If there were a stronger sky gradient, I would have put more effort into that part, but it's fairly flat naturally.

Since this was just an ad-hoc project to take advantage of a clear night, I didn't go any further with the processing.  My wife complains frequently that I don't post enough of my work, so I wanted to complete the entire processing part in the morning.  Normally, I spent way too much time on that part.

I think that it looks pretty good, even with a light processing touch (or maybe *because* of a light processing touch...)