The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) is a spiral galaxy 21 million light-years away from Earth.  Supernova SN 2023ixf is a type II (core collapse) supernova that was discovered May 19, 2023, by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki.

I would have liked to acquire more time on this target, but I only had two decent nights bracketed by nights of high-altitude smoke on one end and clouds on the other. This is shot from a Bortle 7 light polluted area, so it required some new image processing techniques in PixInsight to beat back the noise without wrecking the signal.

This image was captured with a completely new rig (all of which was new to me):

• Stellarvue SVX102T with SFFX-1 field flattener
• NiteCrawler WR30 focuser / rotator
• Player One Poseidon-M
• Player One Phoenix Wheel
• Player One OAG Max
• Player One Sedna-M
• Pegasus Powerbox Micro
• Pegasus USB Control Hub
• Mele Quieter 3 minicomputer
• Nina

The first night took about 6 hours to get everything working right, with most of that time spent fumbling with ASCOM, PHD2, and Nina.  Coming from the ASAIR I have a new appreciation for how ZWO greatly simplifies the image capture process, but I also discovered a whole new level of precision that comes from a custom PC build with full featured software.

I went with the Player One image train for a couple reasons, build quality, larger OAG prism, deeper well depth on the sensor, and of course the back facing tilt plate to better manage sensor tilt.  I've always struggled with tilt on my previous setup going so far as to use an Octopi but still not having much success.  I was astonished when I took my first tilt measurements to find practically no tilt and dead-on accurate back focus.  The stars were nice and round with no spikes, a testament to the quality of the Stellarvue SVX102T scope, and considerable improvement over my Redcat 71 that always suffered from star spikes, likely due to pinched optics.  Here's one 60 second luminance frame from the ASTAP image inspection with the sample sub as one of the revisions:



One nice advantage with the Player One Poseidon rear facing tilt plate is that you can unscrew the camera from the filter wheel without having to completely disassemble the image train from the scope.  You just unscrew the four bolts from the back of the tile plate and the camera can be removed from the filter wheel, which is nice to allow you to blow out dust from the back of the filters or from the camera sensor window.

The NiteCrawler, Pegasus PowerBox Mini, and USB Control hub, and Mele Quieter 3 worked flawlessly.  My biggest challenge was dialing in PHD2 with the new guide camera and fumbling my way through Nina for the first time.  That advanced sequencer is brutal in terms of learning curve, I found it way easier to use the "legacy" sequencer to do basic setup then export to the advanced sequencer for more advanced features like rotation. PHD2 / guide camera settings still need some work because for a good portion of my imaging sessions, multi-star guiding was not working, limiting me to just single star guiding.  Predictive PEC works amazingly well with the EQ6R-Pro mount though I'm starting to push the weight limit with 33 pounds of counterweights.  Troubleshooting these issues and dialing in everything to perfection is one of the things that keeps me coming back for more in this hobby. 

Another note on the quality of this build, I performed absolutely no star reduction on the final image.

Next up, testing the reducer to prepare for summer imaging of the Milky Way.