đź” 2022 Gear Overview
Overview
I decided to try a new target, the Heart Nebula. It is only 7500 light years away, much closer than Andromeda, which is 2.5 million light years away. As images of this nebula were starting to come in I showed them to my kids. They thought I drew a heart shape on the screen and didn’t believe it was real.
Guiding
As I was capturing images of the heart nebula, I was not happy with how the images were coming back. There were some star trails even on shorter exposures.
I eventually realized that I had not been using the auto-guiding with my guide scope. In fact, I had never been using that. I couldn’t believe it. Once I saw that I played around to try to figure out how to get it set up and calibrated. After that the images were amazingly clear!
Capture Details
I took some 5-minute and some 10-minute images over two nights.
8 @ 600 seconds (1.3 hours)
63 @ 300 seconds (5.25 hours)
Total: 6.5 hours
I also took the corresponding calibration frames.
Output
And just to show that the order of operations really matters, in the image above I started with “Photometric Color Calibration” in Siril followed by “Remove Green Noise.” In the image below I did them in the opposite order.
