Messier 106 in Canes Venatici
These are never really “done” but I’m tried of fiddling with this one so here goes…
I did so many things wrong with this image. I started out pretty late in the season for this one and kind of ran out of time, and fought mount tracking issues and windy nights most of the way. I’m surprised it came out as well as it did. Thank goodness for PixInsight. The gradient correction functions are amazing and really helped fix a lot of issues introduced by light pollution and my crappy flat frames.
I’m still learning a lot about the QHY268m and I’m finding that I have to completely change how I capture images. With my old CCD based ST-8300 the rule was “as cold as possible, and as long as possible.” With the CMOS QHY those rules don’t apply. I’m completely maxing out the sensor, and getting very flat bloated stars doing 300 second exposures. From the advice I have been getting, doing many, much shorter, exposures for LRGB is the way to go. Looking forward to the autumn and having a go at Orion, the Horsehead and the Pleiades using that approach.
- Taken from a Bortle 5 suburban back yard.
- Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 at f/8 with the Extender-Q 1.6x.
- QHY268M, Photographic DSO Mode-2CMS, gain 56, offset 25, 1×1 binning.
- QHYCFW3 7 position 36mm filter wheel.
- IDAS LPS-D3 36mm filter for luminance
- Astronomik Deep-Sky 36mm RGB filters
- Baader 36mm 7nm Hydrogen-Alpha filter
- The red filter data was combined with Badder HA filter to try to emphasize the hydrogen alpha areas. It kind of worked, I guess?
- Losmady G11 Gemini 2, guided with a piggybacked AstroTech 65EDQ and an ASI120MM Mini autoguider.
- Software included PHD2 for guiding, Sequence Generator Pro for acquisition, and PixInsight for image processing.
140 x 300s luminance integrations (IDAS LPS-D3)
90 x 300s Hydrogen Alpha integrations
40 x 300s each red, green, and blue filters
About 30 hours total integration time.