First Quarter EAA

I went out today because conditions were clear as forecasted. The moon is in its first quarter but by the time I went out and finished by setup (~9am) it was behind the house.

I started by a few planetary nebulas which I imaged without the focal reducer. Then added the focal reducer and imaged various nebulas (and some clusters and Uranus). I used the L-Enhance the whole night.

It helped for most targets: some previously hard target were easier to see (e.g. C50), some nebulas however were not or hardly visible.

Afterwards I ran my stacking script. Like previously, it has a tendency to wash out the images i.e lose the colors, or "shift" them e.g. red looks orange. I need to play some more with the various settings and maybe I should look at "photometric calibration" where colors are adjusted after plate solving the image and looking up the true colors of key stars in the frame.

Most of the pictures below were generated with the stacking script. Some had their saturation boosted in Preview.

Observations:

M76 Little Dumbbell Nebula - Perseus
C22 Blue Snowball Nebula - Andromeda - too bright - used medium gain but still could barely see inner structure
NGC 1514 Crystal Ball Nebula - Taurus
C56 Skull Nebula - Cetus
NGC 1333 Embryo Nebula - Perseus - very little visible
NGC 281 Pacman Nebula - Cassiopeia
IC 1795 Fish Head Nebula - Cassiopeia
C14 Double Cluster - Perseus
NGC 1491 Fossil Footprint Nebula - Perseus - only the brightest part can be seen
M45 Pleiades - Taurus - some nebulosity visible - not my best picture
Uranus - a moon or two visible?
M42 Great Orion Nebula and M43 De Mairan's Nebula 128x2.5s
NGC 1977 Running Man Nebula - Orion
NGC 1788 Cosmic Bat Nebula - Orion - barely anything
IC 434 Horsehead Nebula and NGC 2024 Flame Nebula - Orion
M1 Crab Nebula - Taurus
IC 443 Jellyfish Nebula - Gemino - not as impressive as Veil's Nebula - may be I wait to image it when it's not so low (and to the East)
IC 2169 Dreyer's Nebula - Monoceros - invisble
NGC 2264 Cone Nebula - Monoceros
C50 Rosette Nebula - Monoceros - too large for my FL - gets clipped as soon as the image drifts a bit - but easier to see in real time than without filter