Horsehead, Very Quick And Kinda Dirty!

[cathalferris]

2016 January 14th

AVX mount, second night trying to get used to the autoguider. Celestron Onyx 80ED, Canon 600D camera, Kunming (?) 1.0x flattener and CLS filter.

Guided with Synguider through IKI 70ED refractor, with a Rube Goldberg dual mounting using a SW L-Bracket and Manfrotto tripod head.

4x 10 min subs, that definitely trailed a bit..

14x 5 min subs, for a total of 110 min.

14 flats, 7 darks and 16 bias frames, but no darks for the 10 min exposures unfortunately as I ran out of both battery and time at the end of the night.

Registered and stacked in DSS, PS CS2 for final aesthetics.

I did shoot this as it was descending into the light pollution of Limerick City to my west and southwest, hence the rather obvious gradient. My guiding isn't yet solid and I have a couple of things to work through first.. I may have an issue with the mount that I'll document in another thread, and I know that I have some possibility of flexure in the dual mounting. The synguider was dead happy guiding away for the near two hours.. I didn't try to keep tight star images around Alnitak. I've literally just stacked them all up and played with the end result that I got.

I'm a little disappointed in the end result, after that long of total exposure. It's noisy and I have an awkward gradient. There were some exposures that had a  little low cloud scudding through. I suppose that if the guiding is not yet up to par, I can't expect greatness yet! Still, it's a pretty enough pic.

[PeterCPC]

Great image but the red needs cutting back.

Peter