So I managed to go out and quickly bag a few images of M13 to test the travel scope on the night of the 1st to the 2nd September. It was relatively cool and clear. The main aim was could I take images that were not overexposed on stars whilst capturing the fainter stars at the same time. Also I wanted to make sure I could process an image too.
So all in I took 10 x 5 minute exposures but unfortunately I had not read the Skywatcher manual and had not locked up the focus tube. This meant that the first 3 frames were out of focus so I tightened the locking latch and then took the other 7.
On processing the image I noted the black (white) band to the top and right of the image where I had not switched off the setting for Overscan. I could not PixInsight to recognise it properly so I simply pre-processed the image and then cropped it out before processing.
I managed to get Photometric Colour Calibration working which helped get the colour just right. I then processed in my usual way using the following workflow.
- Calibrate with Flats and Darks only no Bias as it is a CMOS camera
- Integrate the frames
- Align
- Perform Cosmetic Correction
- Debayer
- Crop
- ABE
- Background Neutralisation
- Platesolve
- Photometric Colour Calibration
- Histogram Stretch
- TGVDenoise
- ACDNR
- Curves
- Dark Structure Enhance
- Exponential Transformation
- 2nd set of Curves
- SCNR for green
The final image was ok for the short amount of data I obtained and proved my capture setting and workflow worked
