I was lucky enough to have a second clear night in a row and I intended to collect more photons from Pleiades but it hadn’t risen when I started my session. So, I decided to image Andromeda Galaxy instead. I’d never got a satisfactory result from this target in the past so I thought I’d get a few hours on it. A few hours turned into 4hrs and I never did switch back to Pleiades. Andromeda is harder to process than it is to capture, and I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with the result, but it’s a million times better than I’ve achieved in the past

Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED with Starizona Flattener, IR Cut filter, Risingcam IMX585, guided ~4hr 2mins of data

This target was one of the first that I ever tried to image in 2021. My first attempt was really bad so I thought I’d have to remedy that. This is the result of almost 3hrs of data. No filters other than the IR cut.

Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED with Starizona Flattener, IR Cut filter, Risingcam IMX585, guided ~2hr 56mins of data

My processing techniques have improved a lot recently, so I’ve reprocessed this old data and got what I believe is a better processed version. My new technique is documented here

Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED with Starizona Flattener, UHC and IR Cut filter, Risingcam IMX585, guided ~2hr 50mins of data

My wife has been nagging me for ages to take a pic of the Moon. I’d always pushed back because to be honest, I wasn’t at all interested. To me, it’s just a big source of light pollution for my deep space imaging. But, I relented. I pointed the camera at the moon at got 10mins worth of very short exposures. I didn’t even bother removing the nebula filter. The next day, I spent ages working out the correct workflow for planetary/lunar because it’s really quite different from deep space. I settled on using PIPP for cropping and converting to avi, feeding into Autostakkert for stacking. The big hurdle for me was getting PIPP/Autostakkert to accept my bayer FITS files. No matter what I didn, they wouldn’t debayer properly. Eventually, I used Siril to debayer my FITS prior to feeding into PIPP/Autostakkert which worked wonderfully. The end result isn’t too bad for my first attempt, even if I do say so myself. However, I’ve now been seduced by some of these “mineral” Moon pics I see online where they’re full of colour rather than being bland greyscale blobs, so I’ll be trying this again at the next full moon, but this time I will remove my nebula filter.

Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED with Starizona Flattener, UHC and IR Cut filter, Risingcam IMX585, ~10mins of data

I’m on a roll now! Yet another clear night so I thought I’d pick a target that I could image immediately and get a good number of hours on without staying up too late. The two choices were Wizard Nebula or Pacman Nebula. Wizard rises a good 30mins before Pacman, so Wizard it is. I managed to get a good polar alignment and had good guiding on this, so I just let it rip for a few hours. I didn’t get much OIII data (for some reason) so the image is mostly Ha which is why it’s so red. I think I’ll need a lot longer integration time if I want to collect more Ha data. Anyway, it looks good as-is so I’m happy

Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED with Starizona Flattener, UHC and IR Cut filter, Risingcam IMX585, guided ~2hrs of data