The scope used was a William Optics Super Zenithstar 81mm ED Doublet APO refractor at f/5.5 with x0.8 flattener/reducer fitted with an Altair magnetic filter holder version 2.
An SVBONY SV605MC cooled, monochrome CMOS camera was placed at the focus of the telescope which was mounted on a Celestron AVX EQ, GOTO mount. An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope. PHD2 auto-guiding was controlled by a separate Linux laptop for convenience.
AstroDMx Capture controlled the mount via an INDI server running on a Raspberry Pi computer. The hand controller was connected to the Raspberry Pi and AstroDMx Capture communicated with the INDI serve on the Pi via the local network.
AstroDMx Capture sent the scope/mount to a bright star; a Bahtinov mask was fitted and focus was checked and adjusted if required. This had to be done with each of the 2" Red, Green and Blue filters.
As usual, the mount was placed on marks on the ground which gives an acceptable polar alignment.
AstroDMx Capture sent the mount/scope to Altair to focus with a Bahtinov mask and then M20, the Trifid nebula.
AstroDMx Capture capturing 40 x 30s FITS exposures through the Red filter
AstroDMx Capture capturing 40 x 30s FITS exposures through the Blue filter
40 x 30s FITS exposures were also captured through the Green filter. Darks and Flats were also used
Deep Sky Stacker was used to stack the images as well as co-align the colour channels.
The three colour channels were precisely co-aligned with Deep Sky Stacker using the method we used HERE.
The resulting images were RGB components combined in Gimp 2.10 and further processed in GraXpert, Neat Image and PhotoScape X Pro.
M20, The Trifid Nebula
The data were obtained while testing the plate-solving and assisted meridian flip developments in AstroDMx Capture.
