After the failed Friday night attempt I wasn't thinking I would have any more attempts for the weekend, but was planning for Tuesday night which is setup to be a clear night. We had gone out on the boat to another little island and after a full day in the sun and surf most everyone was exhausted. Below are some images of the Blue Waters and one of the oldest lighthouses in the Caribbean built in the 1600s.
Everyone was pretty tired, half the house was asleep by 7:30 and to my surprise the wind was low and the cloud cover was 1%, so I setup the scope and saw what I could get. My first target was the Soul Nebula and I as able to get 60 x 60s exposures, but its a little more faint so the processing is taking a little longer. But during that entire run the HFR graph in N.I.N.A was almost straight flat around 2.4 and the star count was pretty level too. Normally what I do is setup my imaging session and control through N.I.N.A and then have SharpCap and the folder monitor camera do a live stack on the N.I.N.A folder. This allows me to see the images build and gives a great idea of the quality of the images coming in. One odd thing, and I haven't had this until tonight but the debayer in SharpCap was really off and all of my images were very green. I thought it might be the target while shooting the Soul Nebula so I didn't think much of it.
I had some issues with my StarSense and a calibration issue at the beginning of the session but since guiding was so good (like .24 pixels Total error) I didn't worry about it but it ended up affecting my meridian flip. N.I.N.A did the flip but because the mount was off when it did the plate solve it forced the mount to go back to the other side of the meridian. I need to look into that cause it happened again on my next target.
There were some low level clouds to the north so I decided (after resetting the mount) to go for Orion, just because I wanted to boost my confidence again. And wow... truly amazing. The first image I took of Orion in mid August was during a pretty bright moon and I think I ended up posting the SharpCap version cause I was having issues with PixInsight stacking. For the previous target (Soul Nebula) I had rotated the Camera 90 degrees so I could get everything in one frame. I left it that way for Orion and got some really cool nebulosity on the sides of Orion and its a cool aspect. Never-less, I captured 240 x 15s exposures at unity gain (120) and after doing my subframe selection in PixInsight only tossed out 2 frames... thats a first for me because a clear night in Culebra still has clouds.
I also used some new Photoshop tricks I picked up from one of Trevor from AstroBackyard using the Select and Mask tool. It really helped pull the color out including a lot of the brown nebulosity around Orion. Here is my 238 x 15s exposure image of M42 Orion Nebula.
Because the night was so clear I captured another hour of the Christmas Tree Nebula but again I'm still processing that.
More to come and Dark Skys and Blue Waters
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