A William Optics ZenithStar 66 SD Apochromatic refractor wasmounted on a Celestron AVX mount. An Atik 314L mono CCD was mounted at the focus. FITS images with matching dark frames were captured using AstroDMx Capture for macOS of M37.
35 x 20s exposures were stacked in Affinity Photo and post processed in Affinity Photo and the Gimp 2.10.
M37 in Auriga
The camera was fitted with a H-alpha narrowband filter and 5 minute, unguided FITS images were captured with matching dark frames. 9 x 5min unguided FITS exposures of the central part of the Seagull nebula were stacked in Affinity Photo with flat fields and post processed in Affinity Photo, the Gimp 2.10 and Neat Image.
Unguided Seagull nebula, IC 2177, 45 minutes total exposure time
The next night, the Atik 314L CCD camera fitted with a H-alpha narrowband filter was mounted alongside a 50mm guidescope fitted with a QHY 5L-II mono CMOS guide camera.
The scope was autoguided using PHD2 running on a Fedora Linux computer.
The guiding rig
Screenshot of PHD2 autoguiding.
8 x 10 minute FITS exposures were captured of the central part of the Seagull nebula using AstroDMx Capture for macOS on a Mackbook Air computer.
The equipment capturing images of the Seagull nebula
Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture for macOS capturing 10 minute, guided images of the Seagull nebula, IC 2177.
The Seagull nebula, 1 hour, 20 minutes total exposure time
The two images of the Seagull nebula covered slightly different areas of the nebula so they were stitched into a mosaic using Affinity Photo.
Mosaic of the Seagull nebula
Autoguiding allows for longer exposures and these experiments have shown that PHD2 can be used with Linux, whilst the capturing was done by AstroDMx Capture for macOS.
