IC342

[Paul M]

Last night was my first outing since April, with the Moon being a killjoy, I just used the ocassion as a shake down. The evening was strewn with difficulties but I eventually got going. I chose a subject away from the Moon that would be visible for most of the night. 

IC342 is quite a large galaxy, this is uncropped, but low surface brightness. Nothing much else in this frame other than a couple of barely detected galaxies.

26 x 300 sec, ASI071MC Pro, RC250 with 0.8x reducer/flattener, atop my trusty old NEQ6 Pro. Borg 60ED guidescope and ASI 120mm mini guide camera.

I took some flats this morning, in the cold light of day. White T shirt job, but the flats worked very well, until I started stretching and found the flats had frost marks on the sensor   I'd cooled the camera too quickly. So I took a new lot as dusk approached but they don't seem to have been the best. Darks and bias also applied. I usually try to get away with using only flats but at that length of exposure and sky brightnes, the ammount of stretching needed also called for a full set of callibration frames.

The data has been stacked by various means, none were great. This result is from stacking and stretching in Siril. Not my prefered tool but it does make a better job of (my) poor data.

Other online images have this area awash with IFN but that is way beyond my skill and sky and, anyway, I've manged to clip the black while losing all manner of artifacts.

Look, it's not my fault! I wanted to go after a very obscure Trans Neptunian Object in Orion, but with that glowing cheesball sat on top of it..? 🤣