Two Qs (2 DSS & 1 tracking related)

[vineyard]

Hello,

Here's M36 that I took & processed last night.  30 lights of 30 sec (w darks & biases applied).  ASI178MC.  Its not great but I'm just getting started so I'm quite happy enough with it for now.  Esp as the main objective last night was to test the Mount Model capability of my kit with EKOS (it worked ).

Q1.  Does M36 have some colour in it in real life.  I could have sworn that when looking at the lights as they were being taken there were some colour stars?  Yet this image insists on coming out as grey scale.  I've made the FITS setting adjustment in DSS multiple times to Generic RGGB (and also Generic GBRG) and saved it a a 16bit TIF file, but every time in GIMP it only shows greyscale (even the linear stretch previewed in DSS only shows grey scale, no RGB).  Am I doing something wrong, or is there really no colour in M36?

Q2.  I tried stacking with SiriL and it came up as saying it could not find any stars in the image!  As did PI.  So I then used DSS (I knew quality may be variable across all the lights b/c clouds were passing through, neighbours lights were going on & off etc).  DSS did find enough stars to stack although it didn't pick many images to stack.  Is it common for different stacking software to return different responses like this?

Q3.  This is probably a Q for the mounting section, but I'll include it here for completeness.  I did rough polar alignment, did the Mount Model alignment (3 stars), and it plate solves and slews to target correctly.  So far all good.  But then as the lights are being taken I can see the image is moving in the FITS viewer.  So is this the mount not quite tracking right, is it a periodic correction error (I'm not sure what that means tbh!), or is it inevitable with tracking (its an old GP2 with an EQStar EQ5 go-to modification) - is this what would be improved with a guide camera also set up?

Thank you for any pointers!

Vin

[vineyard]

So this just got weirder.  I'd saved a JPG of a GIMP'ed version of the TIF file.  Today I reopened that JPG in GIMP and 3 colour channels were there?  But if I go back to the TIF it only shows greyscale channel.  <Scratching head, but if this the workflow that works then hey ho!>