Longer Stacks of a Galaxies

I went out to take advantage of a clear night with no moon (New Moon is 3 days away). Although there were no clouds, the sky looked washed out especially to the east so seeing was rather poor.

My initial plan was to image galaxies with the L-QEF filter and no focal reducer. I started with M81, and it looked terrible. So I tried again without the filter, and ASILive had trouble stacking (skipping half the frames). Interestingly, Siril was able to stack the frames that ASILive had trouble lining up. The result below is actually pretty good.

So I decided to bring back the focal reducer and continue imaging without filter. I did not want to just repeat what I have done before (same target, same sub frame duration etc), so I decided to try longer stacks. I kept the sub frame at 3s since the tracking was not that great but stacked each target for about 10 minutes. On the last one M106, I ended up capturing more than 10 minutes worth of images. ASILive was skipping frames when I had it running in the background - I had started working on this post. But the captured frames were successfully registered / stacked by Siril.

I also realized my stacking script was reporting 2x the number of frames when using "seqSubSky=true", so I had to rename previously saved images and revisit some of the previous blog posts.

Observations: