Beautiful series of clear nights, new moon, good weather. This was the last clear night on the Tuesday of US Thanksgiving week. Work will be rough with little sleep tomorrow, but I will kick myself if I pass on such a good night. I hope to recover by sleeping in over the holiday weekend. Three hours of data and three hours of sleep.

Set scope outside at 11PM (Tue 11/22)
Started run at 12AM 11/23
All packed up at 4AM with 3 hours of data
Stacked the best 2 hours of data

Interested to see how the high dynamic range of the QHY268C handles the bright Orion, especially on high gain mode. I am amazed at how the depth of the well on this camera keeps bright hot spots from blowing out, especially in high gain mode. I can easily open the integration in GIMP and drop the highlights a couple times to reduce the bright spots and expose the detail underneath.

Camera Settings:
QHY268C
Mode 1 high gain
Gain 60
Offset 30
USB speed 10
Temp -10C

Bortle 6
115/805mm refractor with 0.8 reducer/flattener is f/5.6

The first version of this image posted is from a single frame. I am blown away by how the QHY268C camera can capture so much in only 120 seconds. With the focal reducer the scope was configured at f/5.6. That kind of detail is what I would end up with after an entire session with my modded Canon 6D.

ALL. NIGHT. LONG. There were satellites running below the nebula, and a few others criss-crossing here and there. I also might have captured a short meteor trail. So for four hours straight the satellites tracked in the same position just below the nebula through nearly every frame. One, two, three, four at a time... all across the sky.

It was a perfect run on the capture. After adjusting some settings in Astroberry/Ekos there were no crashes tonight. Guiding was smooth for the whole session. Beautiful session.

Processing:
APP: Remove light pollution, Calibrate Star Color, Reduce stars, Crop
GIMP: Crop, Levels (all channels), Levels (green mid sweep), Curves, Shadows-Highlights, Hue-Chroma (slight boost on chroma), Saturation, Scale