Well it’s been a very long while since I did any astrophotography. The guys in the club have been very active this year and their enthusiasm started to rub of on me. I knew I had some data taken during one of the Covid lockdowns in 2020, so I updated Pixinsight and went to find the files.

The subs were many more than I thought. I did loose a few to cloud, but in the end I managed to integrate 6.85 hours worth. I was told about the magic of Russ Croman’s BlurExterminator and NoiseExterminator, so I added a 30 day trial for both. The data was very smooth, so all that has been done to this is one round of BlurExterminator followed by star extraction using Starnet 2 so I could then work on the nebulosity in Affinity2 for some localised dodge and burn, background noise reduction and selective high pass sharpening. then back into PI and added the stars back. That’s it.

With so much capture time, this really was so easy to process.

The camera was my new ZWO ASI1600MM Pro on the iOptron EC120EC mount. I used a Baader 35nm passband H-Alpha filter.

This bout of interest made be decided to rebuild the observatory – for the third time, but more of that later.