After a long long rainy summer I finally could take advantage of the "fallen trees" on my neighbors lawn so that I have better access to the south, and in Florida this is not bad to have.

For me the Helix Nebula is one of the most wonderful targets in the night sky, and I was always "jealous" of others who had a free view on it. So it was almost natural that I targeted it as my first more southern object in the sky that needed a lot of integration time.

And ... I dug out my old achromatic 6 inch refractor, which the MyT mount handled very well, still happy about it, all my recommendations to it.

I also used it as a final test to figure out if an achromat scope can deal with narrow band images well enough, theoretically yes, but as many things in life only the result judges, and I believe it turned out positive! All channels were focused separately, the big problem with achromats that they cannot do this for a wider spectrum.

Another very interesting part of this experiment was the usage of all my filters for Hα, OIII and SII. I thought that using the HighSpeedfilters (with a slightly wider band, ~10nm) might give more volume, oh how wrong I was with that! While the HighSpeed Hα was really a big game changer (a LOT more nebula), the OIII and SII HighSpeedfilter data were lousy, to say the least. I used them for noise reduction, but for anything else they were just not good enough. So lesson learned, maybe some good information for others with HighSpeedfilters as well, do not use OIII and SII on slower scopes.

So this is the result, I love the magnification level of a 1200mm scope. Yes, not the best and perfect lenses, but it brought out quite some details that I do not think that I could have obtained with my 714mm Explore Scientific scope.

There will be more versions of this image, I want to get the "eyebrow" more out. I spent on this image a LOT of time, since I wanted it so desperately looking perfect, with this target a must!

I am happy with it, I hope that you like it as much as I do.