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Pairing an ASI183MC Pro (2.4μm) with a Skymax 127 at 1500mm native is not generally a recommended setup, especially not from a Bortle 6 inner city location. The pixel scale alone, at 0.33 arcsec/px, is so oversampled that you're essentially just getting a lot of blurry pixels. And I'm not arguing against it; that's absolutely the case here. Binning x3 will get the same level of detail without the hassle of dealing with 20MP subs. But hear me out. I really wanted to get the Bubble Nebula. It was on my to-do list. And I'm in a situation right now where my next best scope is not in the cards in the foreseeable future. So I could either go for another wide field target or frankenstein some sort of setup with my only other scope: my Mak. So I lifted the ASI183MC Pro + Altair Filter Holder w/ Antlia ALT-T + ZWO OAG off my wide field setup and through a lucky combination of adapters managed to stick it to the back of the Mak 127. For focusing I had to rely on the stock focuser without so much as a Bahtinov mask (that was ... uhm ... "fun"). Speaking of focusing, I soon realised that the Antlia filter, nice as it is, blocks so much light that I was unable to focus or polar align without going to 10s exposures, which wouldn't work because of drift. So the whole process was to do a first focus with no filter in the slot, polar align, enable tracking, then slot in the filter and refocus. Then refocus every ~30min because temp deltas at night are horrible right now in my location. This whole song and dance went on for four nights these past two weeks or so and while I can take some credit for careful planning and choosing the best equipment I have for the job, credit where it's due: my beautiful red RST-135 tracked and guided like a champ. I was consistently getting ~0.3" RMS, sometimes going down as far as 0.2". It wasn't all perfect and I did throw away about 40 subs but what I ended up with were 133 decent subs that yielded the final result. So here I go piling on to the same age old advice: get a good mount. If you want to throw a like or just a look, the image is also on Astrobin. So, despite the math saying it's not the best setup to throw at a Mag 10 emission nebula and it certainly doesn't compare to what some of you have done with this target, I'm really proud of the result and I see it as a landmark in my own journey into astrophotography. Thanks for reading!

In what was my final image with the Optolong L-eXtreme filter before I had to send it back to FLO, I turned it over to Cassiopeia. I knew that the Lobster Claw nebula was hiding there somewhere by using Telescopius and framing it that way (since it doesn't show in Stellarium). I realised that with the field of view achieved by the 80ED, reducer and 071mc Pro I could fit no less than 4, possibly 5 or even 6 DSOs in one frame. I love this part of the night sky. The final image is composed of 31 x 300 second exposures, gain 95 at -5c. I ended up using the wrong dark frames by accident to calibrate it, and in all honesty I was too lazy to go shoot the right dark frames and re-edit it. So I just cropped out any nasty parts and edited it as normal. Not great practice I know but I really didn't get enough time with this target anyway. Either way I'm sharing the result and I hope you enjoy it! Clear skies all, keep looking up & keep them cameras clicking

First night - missed the target and took lots of images of some nearby stars Second night - 35 x 2 min Third night - 60 x 2 min I've tried stacking the two nights separately and all together to give a total of 3 hours, but the stacked images all turn out roughly same. Think I must be limited somewhere else and the extra data isn't being captured. The best of the batch was a very quick process of night 3, 2 hours. I was happy to see the bubble shape and a bit of cloudy bits Bresser AR 102/600 - Bresser HD camera - Stacked in Siril, simple process in Pixinsight

NGC 7635 The Bubble Nebula in Cassiopeia Imaged using Atik 314L monochrome CCD camera and William Optics FLT-110 refractor on NEQ6 Pro SynScan mount 10 x 300 second subs in H-alpha

...holy poop! OK, so I waited.... and I waited.... and I waited.... I waited until the arms of Morpheus were closing on me. Finally, I just set it and forgot aboutit. I figured I could clean up the mess in the morning, or delete it. But then I thought, maybe this could be of some use to somebody in some small way.... PHD2 decided to flat line after doing my sequence triggering. Unusual behavior, but PHD2 did a flat line with a few intermittent spikes above or below the center (zero) line. Rather than continue fighting with it, I decided to test what Stellarium would do as a stand alone. A while back, I was doing some testing of my USB and WiFi MoJo and discovered Stellarium will actually make my mount follow the target for hours on end. Last night, I decided I was too tired to be bothered with it and let it run to see what would happen with Stellarium running. When I discovered Stellarium would do rough guiding on it's own, I messaged Alex, one of the developers, and asked if Stellarium could guide like PHD2 can. No was the answer. But I always wanted to test that because there is a centering icon that puts a selected target in the center of the screen. And in my observation, seemed to continue to hang onto it. So Phd2 acting up, Sleepy, I decided to go to bed and let it run. Normally I'd delete something like this. But thought it demonstrated a bit about Stellarium's guiding. In my opinion, I think Stellarium could singlehandedly work for visual observing. The below GIF file comprises about 6 hours of imaging. I vill be bach. Here's what happened: 01-07-2017, overnight. Now, I've been working on these GIF files since I discovered I could put a twinkle in my pictures. But the above was a run-away due to some anomaly with PHD2. It also shows the hot pixels that are the bane of my G3 camera. I refer to them as "The Rainbow Sprinkles". Filtering the noise in Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 turns the RGB dots into white faux stars. But they are fixed, and I haven't figured out how to remove them entirely, only to bleach them white. Hopefully one day I can shave these off, or finally afford a better camera. Last night I got things straightened out, my object came naturally centered, miraculously I got a better focus, And I got a nice pile of images to play with. 02-07-2017 Now if anyone is interested in this, it is a sequence of images gathered overnight with a guided telescope/mount taking long exposures. After processing, I save my series as JPG's, then assemble them in an online program called http://gifmaker.me/ Adjusting the time effectively adjusts the Frames Per Second. But you have a better control, IMHO, with the time per image presented. I assemble my images 1,2,3,...16,17,18,17,16,15...3,2,1. That gives the visual of the GIF running and makes the "twinkle" in the final file. Fun to do, and fun to play with. Give it a try with some sequential images of your own.

Finally a clear sky on Thursday, so I managed to catch the Bubble Nebula just before if came too close to the horizon. Explore Scientific 127ED 14 x 8 min Canon 60Da ISO 1600 on EQ8. I hope it is not just me that think it looks like a rubber duck head shooting out of the nebula and heading straight towards earth.........

Here's my attempt at the Bubble Nebula - wide field Link to Astrobin for full resolution: http://www.astrobin.com/users/David_L/ Scope: TS65; Camera: ASI1600MM; L=140x60s RGB=20x60s; Gain: 139; Offset 10; Bias/Flat/No darks; Processed in: PI I'd really appreciate a critique of this as I'm new to LRGB processing and so not sure I'm getting it right - is this roughly what the object should look like? For instance - in the L channel there appears to be a lot of faint nebulosity that I bring out - but when I do and then combine it with the RGB it gives a very "washed out" feel to the background - as if its overexposed David

I set up on Friday 16th under a full moon with a plan of just testing the polar align routine in SharpCap. It works really well, actually better with my mount than Alignmaster now that I have some backlash issues. It takes backlash totally out of the equation! Thanks to @themos (PhotoPolarAlign author) and @rwg (Robin, SharpCap author) for this great feature. It was really fast and easy to do and I'd thoroughly recommend it! Anyway, having accurately polar aligned in record time I thought it would be a waste to let a clear sky go unused when I was already fully set up, full moon or not. This is 45x180s of lights (limited length subs due to the moon), 50 flats and 50 bias. Captured in APT and processed in DSS and PS. It needed a REALLY healthy dose of HLVG which I'm guessing could be due to the full moon (?) as I've never really needed to use it before. Equipment: Canon 350D (Full Spectrum) with CLS-CCD & Baader Mk III MPCC Skywatcher 150p Meade LXD75 Finder Guider Thanks for looking.

Second image with QSI660. 10x200second subs in Ha, Oiii and Sii. Combined in Maxim with Hubble palette (ish0. the green seems a bit strong, but I suppose that reflects the high Ha levels being dominant.) Darks and Bias frames used for calibration. No flats.

It has been so long since I posted a half-decent image, I thought I'd stop worrying about the quality and just put something out there. I haven't aimed a scope at this bit of the sky for a while, but thought this would be a reliable narrow-band candidate to shoot while the moon was nearly full. So here it is, 5 x ten minute Ha and the same in Oiii and Sii (I think, must make better notes!), with the Altair wave 115, atik 460, on the Mesu. I know....Loads of noise, bit too bright, stretched a bit too far, background too blue, field a bit curved at the edges. But I got something at least, even if I do feel well out of practice. Hoping for some clear skies over Christmas. And before someone else says it, yes I know I should be practising my processing while it's cloudy. Jack