The equipment comprised a William Optics 81 mm ED APO refractor with a 0.8 flattener/reducer ED APO refractor with an Altair magnetic 2" filter holder with an Altair 6nm dualband filter Ha/OIII or an LPRO-MAX filter depending on the object being imaged; a ZWO EAF and an Altair Hypercam 533C 14 bit OSC CMOS camera.
The equipment used
The data were captured with AstroDMx Capture for Windows. The scope was mounted on an AVX GOTO mount which was controlled by AstroDMx Capture via an INDI server running on the imaging computer indoors.
The mount was placed on permanent marks on the ground which quickly gives quite a good polar alignment if care is taken with the placement of the tripod feet.
An SVBONY SV165 guide scope with a natively connected QHY-5II-M guide camera was used for PHD2 multistar pulse auto-guiding via the INDI server. The auto-guiding was controlled by a separate Linux laptop indoors.
Screenshot of autoguiding whilst imaging M13
AstroDMx Capture sent the scope/mount to a bright star which was used to focus the scope with a Bahtinov mask. The ZWO AEF was controlled by AstroDMx Capture via the INDI server.
Screenshots of the capturing process
Capturing RAW data on M13 showing the general green cast to the preview
The exposures for the three objects were as follows:
M13: 60 minutes of 5 minute RAW exposures
M101: 35 minutes of 5 minute RAW exposures
The Chinese Dragon nebula, NGC 6559: 90 minutes of 5 minute RAW exposures
The data were debayered, calibrated, stacked and partly processed in PixInsight and post processed in Siril, GraXpert and Gimp 2.10 with Starnet++.
M13
M101
NGC 6559, The Chinese Dragon nebula
RGB
HOO palette
These imaging sessions were for testing AstroDMx Capture following Nicola's major refactoring of the code for Touptek derived cameras, making the program more efficient and stable.
