The Horsehead region with AstroDMx Capture and PHD autoguiding.

A William Optics Zenithstar 66, apochromatic refractor was mounted on an aluminium plate at the side of a short guidescope with a QHY 5L-II M monochrome CMOS camera which was attached by the ST4 guideport to the Autoguiding port of the Celestron AVX mount on which everything was mounted.

An Atik 314L mono CCD camera fitted with a narrowband H-alpha filter was placed at the focus of the apochromatic refractor.

The capture and guidescope mounting on the Celestron AVX mount

The Atik CCD camera was attached to a Macbook Air running AstroDMx Capture for macOS and the QHY CMOS guide camera was attached to a Lenovo ThinkPad X230 laptop running Fedora Linux with PHD2 running as the autoguiding software

The capturing and autoguiding equipment

Screenshot of the PHD2 autoguiding of the scope

The MacBook Air capturing 16-bit FITs data on the Horsehead/Flame nebula regionT

The 16-bit display controls in AstroDMx Capture allowed a good preview of the objects being captured

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture capturing a 24 minute exposure

10 x 6 minute exposures, 1 x 12 minute exposure and 2 x 24 minute exposures were captured with matching dark frames. The Autoguiding performed extremely well and there was zero movement of the image as each image was captured and displayed.

The FITs files were stacked and calibrated with the dark frames and previously captured flat fields in Affinity Photo on the MacBook. The resulting stacked image, which comprised a total exposure time of 2 hours was post processed in Affinity Photo, The Gimp 2.10 and Neat Image Pro, all on the MacBook.

The Horsehead and Flame nebulae in H-alpha light

Closer view

The Celestron AVX mount performed extremely well in conjunction with the PHD2 autoguiding. The new 16-bit brightness controls enabled the display to be set, non destructively to a pleasing view of the objects being captured without the captured data being affected.

These results demonstrate that macOS is a perfectly good imaging platform using AstroDMx Capture for macOS and all native image processing software.