M97 - Owl Nebula

We had two wonderful nights in a row for imaging. I was able to capture first light on NGC 2841, and last night I moved on to the Owl Nebula. Planetary Nebula are so fascinating to me, given their various shapes, sizes, and colors. However, what I’ve most appreciated about them is learning more about how those shapes, sizes, and colors all tell a story about the star and its lifecycle, which of course, has led me to learn even more about the stellar lifecycle itself. It’s far more complex and interesting than I imagined!

I’ve had to change my processing method a little bit for the longer focal length setup, especially in cases where there are fewer stars in the frame. For whatever reason that I haven’t been able to determine, the standard WBPP settings in PixInsight have resulted in extraordinarily poor stacking. I’ve messing about with some calibration, normalization, and integration settings for a couple hours (and re-stacking after each set of changes), I still couldn’t get a workable result. I’m thinking it may have to do with the focal length I’m imaging at, and some hot pixels on the camera. I decided to hop back into Siril for the first time in awhile, and Siril was able to calibrate, register, and stack everything nearly instantly on the first try! It calibrated and stacked 120 light frames, 30 darks, 30 flats, 30 flat darks, and spit out a result in about a minute. I was impressed. Looks like I may need to go back to Siril for stacking for the time being. Once I had a stacked image to work with, I brought it back into PixInsight for the remaining processing. I hit HDMST a couple times, and also made a couple passes of contrast adjustment to try to capture more detail in the core of the nebula. I was even able to capture some of the faint outer ring!

I still think I could probably tweak the guiding settings a little bit, but I am unsure how much impact my little tweaks actually will have when I’m pushing the mount near its reasonable limit for imaging. Overall, I am still very pleased with my new rig. It’s performing exactly how I imagined it would!