Hello,
It's been a while since I last imaged. I upgraded mount, telescope and camera and it took a while for the upgrade to be completed. I also took a bunch of test photos before getting serious of imaging again. This is my first time running complete automation with Sequence Generator Pro including plate solving, auto focusing and auto Meridian Flipping without any manual interruption from myself. It's kind of freaky seeing focuser motor moving and mount performing auto Meridian Flipping on their own. This was taken from under heavy light pollution area of Reno, NV.
Anyway, I chose NGC6946 or Fireworks Galaxy to be my first automated LRGB image and the automation turned out pretty well. Stars in Luminance image were a little bigger than RGB images. Maybe I should have run deconvolution or Morphological Transformation to match star sizes to RGB images.
NGC6946: Fireworks Galaxy. RGB plus Luminance. 0.96"/pixel image scale.
Astrodon Luminance filter, 49 x 6 minutes, Unbinned 1x1. 8/16/2014.
Astrodon Red filter, 10 x 10 minutes, Unbinned 1x1. 8/15/2014.
Astrodon Green filter, 10 x 10 minutes, Unbinned 1x1. 8/15/2014.
Astrodon Blue filter, 10 x 10 minutes, Unbinned 1x1. 8/15/2014.
TEC 140 APO F/7 with Astro-Physics A-P1100GTO GEM. QSI660wsg. Guided with A-P Vario Finder 250mm focal length and Superstar.
Captured with SGP. Calibration with Nebulosity and Post-processed with PixInsight. PHD settings: RA Aggressiveness: 60, RA Hysteresis: 10, Max RA/Dec Duration: 1000, Min Motion: 0.10, Calibration Steps: 550msec, Auto/Resist Switching, Extreme dithering and Settled at < 0.4, 1 sec guiding exposure.
High resolution image at:
http://peternagy.smugmug.com/Telescopes/GalaxiesPeter
