After a couple of cloudy weeks, I had the chance of taking some new images, this time of the flaming star nebula IC 405. The images are not processed, yet, but after some updates to PixInsight I again gave the Weighted Batch Processing Script a chance and stacked the images as OSC to compare results and processing time with SiriL.

The new Skywatcher Quattro 150P offers some exciting opportunities for images of large hydrogen structures, g.e. supernova remnants like the Veil Nebula in the Cygnus constellation.

Early this year (2023) I thought about upgrading my gear for wide field images. I was thinking about a new APS-C or even full frame camera and at the same time moving from OSC to monochrome with a filter wheel. I was still hesitating, because even a kit of a cooled monochrome APS-C with filter wheel and filters (e.g. ZWO Kit ASI2600 MM Pro - 7 Pos 36 mm filter wheel L-RGB & Narrowband) is more than 4.000 EUR and the gain in field view is small:

This May I took some first images with my new Skywatcher Quattro 150P. I selected the Pelican Nebula (IC 5070), using an Optlong L-eXtreme dual band filter.

In the past moths I faced lots of problems with data transmission using my USB cables. I used a 5 m standard cable connected to a 3 m cable with amplifier. Very often I lost contact to the camera or could not even connect. This became worse with the humid conditions end of 2022 as there was lots of flash rust on the connectors. I connected a power supply to my USB hub, but even that did not help.

The weather in southern Germany is bad. Cloudy since months, hardly a clear night. In February, there was a chance to take some images - so I planned to capture IC 63 (an emission nebula) together with and IC59  (a reflection nebula) close to Gamma Cassiopeiae.

Recently, a new tool for PixInsight was released - Russel Coman's BlurXTerminator. Another AI based tool for hobby astronomers, this time for deconvolution - resulting in sharp stars and amazing details in galaxies and nebulae.

Still waiting for clear nights – so I decided to learn more about PixInsight. I processed my old data for M3 for better dynamic range between core and outer regions.

I was wondering if I am using a good sub exposure time for my narrowband images. For faint nebulae, I am always using 240s.

Based on the data collected recently, I started to work out a workflow in PixInsight to create a color mosaic with my Ha and OIII data based on the technique described here. For details, please have a look here.

I decided to re-process my M31 mosaic data with PixInsight. The first image was created using SiriL and Photoshop, stitched with Image Composite Editor from Microsoft:

This night I continued my mosaic on Elephant's Trunk (IC 1396) with my dual-band filter - this time under full moon, clear nights are rare this month.

I updated my page with the different techniques I used for focussing during my astrophotography 'career'. I hope, you find it useful.

I finished my hardware equipment list and added a new page with some facts and thoughts I am collecting to help beginners making decisions pro and contra spending additional money in their equipment.

Today, my younger daughter designed this logo for my website. It took her less than an hour from idea to finish.

Last weekend I was searching the internet if there are news on CUDA acceleration for PixInsight - I didn't find any news on that but I stumbled over this.