I took full advantage of another clear, moonless night—this time with no dew to worry about. The session kicked off with creating calibration frames, including darks, biases, and flats. I captured stacks using 6-second and 5-second subframes, utilizing the L-Enhance filter.
During live stacking, many of the stacks ended up "dirty" due to bad frames. After processing with stackfit.js, those problematic frames were eliminated, but the resulting images make some of the targets harder to discern. This has me questioning whether the EQ platform is truly superior to the previous one, or if the improvement is primarily due to my current workflow and the decision to discard more frames, which allows for slightly longer exposure times.
As usual with stackfit.js, there's a noticeable color shift from red to orange. I experimented with different parameters and found that the shift occurs when using the doSeqSubSky=true option. However, turning this off results in washed-out images with visible vignetting—possibly an indicator that the flat calibration is not ideal.
Observations
- IC 1805 Heart Nebula - Cassiopeia
- IC 1848 Soul Nebula - Cassiopeia
- PK 164+31.1 Heaphone Nebula - Lynx - a hard target magnitude 14
- M1 Crab Nebula - Taurus
- NGC 2024 Flame Nebula - Orion
- IC 434 Horsehead Nebula - Orion
- M42 Orion Nebula and M43 de Mairan's Nebula
- C50 Rosette Nebula - Monoceros
- C46 Hubble's Nebula - Monoceros
- NGC 2264 Cone Nebula - Monoceros
- IC 2177 Seagull Nebula - Canis Major
- IC 443 Jellyfish Nebula - Gemini
- NGC 2174 Monkey Head Nebula - Orion
- SH2-308 Dolphin Nebula - Canis Major - another difficult one - also the L-Enhance filter might not be the right one for that target
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| IC 1805 Heart Nebula - 21x6s |
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| IC 1848 Soul Nebula - 25x6s |
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| PK164+31.1 Headphone Nebula - 24x6s |
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| M1 Crab Nebula - 23x6s |
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| NGC 2024 Flame Nebula - 21x5s |
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| IC 434 Horsehead Nebula - 21x5s |
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| M42 Orion and M43 de Mairan's Nebula - 21x5s |
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| C50 Rosette Nebula - 37x5s |
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| C46 Hubble's Nebula - 17x5s |
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| NGC 2264 Cone Nebula - 36x5s |
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| IC 2177 Seagull Nebula - 29x5s |
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| IC 443 Jellyfish Nebula - 29x5s |
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| NGC 2174 Monkey Head Nebula - 37x5s |
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SH2-308 Dolphin Nebula - 47x5s
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In the following days, I tried to enhance my picture of C50 with https://www.photopea.com.
Although it's time consuming, it showed some potential.
