I decided to continue with my crazy effort of reproducing another rarely imaged target recently completed by
@Bray Falls . The project was SNR G156.2+5.7 which is an extremely faint supernova in Auriga. Bray has me outmatched with better equipment, darker skies and most important, processing experience and competence. This project pushed me to try and learn a lot of new techniques to end up with a result that was semi-recognizable.
I had hoped to acquire more data during an astrophotography road trip to a Bortle 1 site in Portal, Arizona. Unfortunately, clouds and a self inflicted equipment disaster thwarted that effort. There's nothing quite like waking up to find your telescope and imaging rig on the ground. I did a bad job trying to include a riser block on my vixen rail and the retaining bolts did not secure things. Everything fell during the meridian flip. Fortunately, the only thing damaged beyond repair was my EAF so I consider myself lucky. Another rookie mistake!
More imaging time might have been beneficial for this target, but I think I was reaching a point of diminishing returns with the small aperture of my ZenithStar 61. To compensate for the smaller aperture, I decided to go with 1,000 second exposures for the Ha and Oiii channels. Even with a focal length of 288 millimeters, framing was a challenge with the 4/3” sensor of my ASI294MM Pro. I'm not ready to replace my 36mm filters but an APS C sensor camera might be something to consider as a future upgrade. A bit more FOV would have been nice for this one.
The end result isn’t the greatest but I do have bragging rights for the second image of this target on Astrobin and perhaps 1 of half a dozen known images of this target in general.
Here is a link to Bray's amazing image of this target to see what it's supposed to look like along with a great description:
https://www.astrobin.com/awg4o2/
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