The Lazy Astronomer

You don't often see widefield M45 shots - I like it!

Hmm. Not seen anything like this before, the guy there seems to make out like it practically an inevitability, which l feel may be overstating the issue a bit. However, bit of a poor show from ZWO there if you ask me. QC/manufacturing issues aside, the least I would expect would be an offer from them to rectify the problem, not a link to an article on how to fix it yourself! I wonder what their view is on the validity of the warranty if you open up the camera (as per their instruction) and damage the sensor somehow... Highlights the importance of using a reputable shop l guess - I bet FLO would deal with this properly and just send a replacement camera.

Wow that's a busy starfield!!

L-enhance or L-extreme are popular choices for OSC users. The L-extreme is for narrowband imaging of emission type nebulae, so no use on broadband targets like galaxies, but it sounds like you're looking to shoot emission nebulae so this will be what you want. Don't go for an Ha filter with a colour camera - you'll only be using 1/4 of your sensor!

Love a good mono Ha picture. Lots of very faint dust in there 👍

There isn't really any documentation about it, or at least, nothing that immediately popped up with a quick Google (of course, I could just be using the wrong search term), but I've always assumed it assigned the score based on some combination of the number of detected stars and the FWHM.

Don't know about that! 😅 It's mainly the filter doing all the work for me. There's a fair amount of faint nebulosity which benefits greatly from the higher contrast afforded in narrowband. You can actually see a fair amount of it already in your image which is quite impressive and l think shows the difference a modded DSLR makes - have you considered one of those dual-narrowband filters (like the optolong L-extreme) to allow you to take advantage of the mod and really pull out the Ha?

Well, the old ccd fashion used to be to bin rgb x2 to speed up capture and do full resolution lum. At this rgb:lum resolution ratio I would assume that there was no detrimental effect to the image detail or no one would have done it.

Not sure on the usefulness of a comparison here, but this is a quick 10 minute process in Startools with 50 minutes of hydrogen alpha data shot with a dedicated mono astro camera. It'll be a work in progress for several weeks* whilst I collect more data. *Going by the forecast, more like several months!!

No way! I was doing these exact targets for a bit of last night too - practically identical framing too!

Be aware that individual subs will likely look terrible, like there's nothing there, but it will all come out once stacked (and processed).

You really do; very nice wispy detail 👍

I had a quick play in Startools; I won't post the result, because frankly what you've got here already is better. So I would say, in terms of pulling out detail, this probably not too far off as good as you'll get from the data. What I will say though, is I think you have slightly missed focus - what method are you using to focus?

You can practically ignore everything you know about daytime photography - that's how different astrophotography is!! As @iantaylor2uk says, you won't go far wrong with 30 - 60 seconds subs.

Darks are really only of use if you have control over the sensor temperature (eg cooled astro cam), else you end up potentially introducing more problems than you solve. For DSLRs, the usual advice is to take bias and dither between frames.

If you find you need to add a very small amount to the optical train, your camera should have come included with a set of shims of varying thickness (my ZWO camera did, anyway).

You could try usb over cat6? That's advertised to work up to 100m, but the hubs are quite expensive, and I've never used it myself so no idea if they're any good.

I do the same as @PeterCPC. Dedicated scope-side laptop which runs everything, and just remote access it from another PC inside. My WiFi's half decent (most of the time!), so no ethernet cables needed either. If you've got a couple of PC's available, then this is a much better solution than looong usb cables.

Looking good 👍 I would say though, don't worry too much about getting a dark black background - in fact, it's often commented on that startools processed images have too dark a background. Many people prefer a neutral dark grey background. I'm of the opinion that, as long as it isn't black clipped, the darkness of the background is to taste. If you haven't already, check out the unofficial startools manual (available to download as a pdf from the startools website) - loads of useful info and tips and tricks in there.

Actually, I think it does work (in that rice will absorb moisture), albeit not that well, so really it should really be thought of as a poor man's dessicant sachet. Flushing with pure ethanol apparently the way to do it, so you'd better raid your spirits and get distilling! Edit: I've actually just discovered it's not possible to distill pure ethanol out of a water and ethanol mixture containing less than 95.6% ethanol without the use of benzene, so maybe don't do that...

Just fyi, l cropped 3 pixels from each edge and masked off the dust bunny; wipe then seemed pretty happy to do its thing.

As others have already done this, it's probably not so relevant now, but this was the product of 5 or 10 minutes in startools. Nothing fancy done, just a basic crop, wipe, autodev, contrast, hdr (reveal core), colour and superstructure (isolate). I then went and added a bit of skyglow back in film dev: I would have to agree with the others and say it looks like focus was slightly off and I would also say the focus looks slightly off in your IC405 image as well (although you have captured that lovely blue reflection nebula around AE Aurigae, which is very nice 🙂). Below is the luminance channel from my recent attempt at M31, which I've rotated, cropped and resized to roughly match yours (all I've done to it is wipe and autodev) which I hope shows the difference, particularly on the smaller stars. As an end note, you may also have some chromatic aberration - this can be remedied with a UV/IR cut filter which cuts off the extremes of the blue and red light wavelengths (e.g. Astronomik L3)

Fundamentally, l am in agreement with you about the ease of osc, and if l were to upgrade my camera now, l would probably go down the osc route for a bit less faff in my life. But, due to the short exposures it's possible to use with modern CMOS cameras, l can capture one round of all colour channels in just a few minutes and keep repeating the loop until the end of the session. Sure, it's still possible that some subs may be affected by cloud or something, but it would really be very unlucky if one channel was significantly disproportionately affected compared to the others.

I was just thinking that - the CPU must've had a hell of a job stacking them all!!

I would say the 1600 is 'old hat' now. If your choice is only between that and the 2600mc, then go for the 2600mc (and I say this as a mono guy). As a side note, I never really understand the weather argument against mono. With an autofocuser and filter focus offsets, you can run through the filters in a loop, rather than in blocks, and you end up with full colour data from each session.