Black Eye Galaxy with an SV405CC, AstroDMx Capture and a Skymax 127

A motor-focus modified Skymax 127 Maksutov was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount and an SV405CC OSC fitted with an SVBONY UV/IR cut filter was placed at the focus with a star diagonal. An SVBONY 165 guide scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M camera was used for pulse auto-guiding with PHD2. An occultation board was used to shield the equipment from a nearby street light.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Equipment used

AstroDMx Capture was used to capture 33 x 3min FITS exposures of  M64, The Black-Eye Galaxy, with matching dark frames.

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture saving 16 bit FITS images of M64

Multistar pulse autoguiding was done using PHD2.

Screenshot of the auto-guiding

The FITS files were calibrated and stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, and post-processed in the Gimp 2.10, Photoshop Elements and Neat Image.

Wide field image of M64

Cropped image of the Black-Eye Galaxy

This experiment again shows that the SV405CC OSC camera performs well with AstroDMx Capture, and a Skymax 127 Maksutov to obtain deep-sky images.

AstroDMx Capture can be downloaded HERE.

AstroDMx Capture is available for Windows, macOS, Linux including Raspberry Pi OS and ChromeOS.