Exposures were captured with AstroDMx Capture through an Altair Starwave 60 ED refractor with an 0.8 reducer/flattener, a Pegasus FocusCube 2 Motorised Electronic Focuser, an Altair Quadband filter and an SV605CC 14 bit OSC CMOS camera. The scope was mounted on a Celestron AVX mount.
The equipment used
The mount was placed on marks on the ground which quickly gives quite a good polar alignment if care is taken with the placement of the tripod feet.
AstroDMx Capture running on the imaging computer indoors sent the scope/mount, using the integrated INDIGO client, via an INDIGO server running on the same computer, to a bright star and the scope was focused on the star using a Bahtinov mask using the Pegasus focuser controlled by INDIGO.
An SVBONY SV165 guide scope with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was used for PHD2 multistar pulse auto-guiding via the INDIGO server. The auto-guiding was controlled by a separate Linux laptop indoors.
AstroDMx Capture plate-solved and sent the scope/mount to the Cave nebula and captured 18 x 5 minute exposures.
AstroDMx Capture capturing data on the Cave nebula
With a negative preview
The data were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in Gimp 2.10, the Starnet++ Gimp plugin, Neat image and Photoshop CS2.
The data were processed with unmodified data and also using a channel balancing plus selective colours technique to reveal more of the colours.
Normally processed image of the Cave nebula
Balanced channels processed image of the Cave nebula
AstroDMx Capture plate-solved and sent the scope/mount to the Ghost of Cassiopeia nebula and captured 13 x 5 minute exposures.
AstroDMx Capture capturing data on the Ghost of Cassiopeia nebula
With a negative preview
The data were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in Gimp 2.10, the Starnet++ Gimp plugin, Neat image and Photoshop CS2. The channel balancing technique was used to render the final image.
The Ghost of Cassiopeia nebula
Annotated image
AstroDMx Capture worked well with the INDIGO mount and focuser control. It was interesting to balance the channels and reveal more of the colour present in the nebula that would normallyh be overwhelmed by the red from H-alpha and SII, both of which are passed by the Quadband filter as are H-Beta and OIII spectral bands.
