Its been so long since I posted anything but I wanted to share this with you all.   So back in May I was testing my Edge11 SCT with Hyperstar, which brings the scope down to F1.9 at a focal length of 530mm, and because this was Galaxy season I decided to use a higher resolution, smaller size OSC sensor " uncooled " versus the standard cooled APS-C or full frame sensor.  In this experiment I used the PlayerOne UnanusC camera which has a 2.9um pixel size thus bringing my pixel scale down to 1.13"/px for this focal length.  The ambient temperature was around 29C, and I was also dealing with a 75% illuminated moon near by in my bortle 8 skies, so the sly glow was horrible,.  To make things more challenging, I decided to use just an Astronomik IR cut filter versus a light pollution filter as I wanted to illustrate how much detail and color you can achieve by not filtering out so much light as done with a light pollution filter.   Additionally, instead of running at unity gain which would have had a lower read noise (on paper), I decided to run at full well depth at 0 gain.   This allowed me to run longer exposures thus collect more photons without blowing out the image.   A lot of people think they should always run at unity gain but doing so with a fast scope you can lose a lot of dynamic range which we need when the skies are so bright.  So in my test I decided to image M106.  I took 185 frames at 60s each (3hrs total ) to produce this image.   Even though I had a F1.9 scope, the same results could be achieved with a slower scope with longer exposure times.  It just goes to show you can achieve a decent image within heavily light polluted skies, even when the moon is out, using a basic IR cut, a lower focal length telescope with an inexpensive uncooled camera....plus some image processing skills.  I used pixinsight software which took me about 30 minutes to produce this image.   Anyhow, I thought this was a cool thing to share considering all the challenges here 😀.

Regards,
Bill Blanshan