Dwarf-II M-42 Image

[JonCarleton]

I always do a "first-light" now with Messier-42.  This, because it was Messier-42 that first knocked me out of my chair when I put a cheap web-cam on the back of a department store refractor and initially caused this addiction.

I bought the Dwarf II when it first came out with the thought that I could at least use it for solar to the small extent I care about solar and my wife might use it for bird photography.  It turned out that while it was "OK" for solar, it wasn't anywhere the neighborhood of "wonderful" and trying to decide if something was in focus with a tiny phone screen was not ideal for my lousey vision.  So, it sat in the box for a while.

There have been, just recently, some "really not terrible" posts on other services that support the Dwarf II user community.  So I decided to give it another try.  Full disclosure:  I hate phone apps, because my vision is "worn out."  This is why I =do= astrophotography, I can't see anything in an eyepiece.  So, I did a small hack.  I used a Raspberry Pi4 and installed Android as the OS, after which I loaded the Dwarflab app.  Success!  I could use a big HDMI screen and keyboard and mouse.

The device turned out to be remarkably simple to use to collect images.  Although, being Alt/Az, I find that 1200-1500 10 second images is a good place to start.  But, I can set it up and start imaging in about 5 minutes and just leave it to its own devices.  This image is the result of one such session.  This set was around 1300 images at 10 seconds over 4 nights.  No filters.  Bortal 4 sky.  Graded with ASTAP and 10% discarded for quality.  Stacked with Siril.  Some processing in PixInsight.  And finally, finished in GIMP.  All Linux.

It isn't a "pixel-peeping-proof image," but not bad, in my opinion, for the limited amount of effort involved.