Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr)  ·  Contains:  M 20  ·  NGC 6514  ·  Trifid Nebula
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M20, dkamen
M20
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Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M20, dkamen
M20
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Description

M20 done in 5 nights with a 1.5-2 hour imaging window, very low on the horizon, right above all kinds of light, with 30+ degrees ambient temperature. I took about 1300 subs with the mono camera and another 1400 with the OSC. I kept the best 1090 of each set (well, set of sets as they were taken over multiple nights), integrated in APP and processed almost entirely in StartTools with finishing touches in Darktable. 

It does look a little blurry (particularly the stars), this is a consequence of terrible seeing that low on the horizon and also the price I had to pay for the aggressive denoising, necessary with so high noise from high temperatures and light pollution. I think it's justified though, it's the nebulosity that I wanted to see and not the stars. And if you bring it at the same scale as the image of M20 I took with the 60/360 two years ago, it is actually waaaaaaay sharper. 

There's a slightly underexposed (present in only 200 subs) band on the right - lower right of the image which APP simply would render darker as its Local Normalisation seems to break when you have more than 500 subs or so. I used a mask to increase its exposure a little bit on Darktable so that it wouldn't look as bad, but did leave a few edges out (I suck at drawing masks).  

I am so satisfied with this image I don't think I'll do any astro during my holidays. Not to mention the exhaustion from imaging between 1am and 3am in the middle of a heatwave.

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M20, dkamen