Monday night, the 28th, the clear sky chart for my area was calling for clear skies. However, the seeing was supposed to be quite poor and the night started with quite a bit of wind. It turned out the forecast for clear skies was correct. Fortunately, the forecast for poor seeing was dead wrong and seeing turned out to be excellent. I can usually tell if the seeing is good or bad by looking at how low my HFR values get during the auto-focus routine. They were good right from the start.
I had previously imaged the Cocoon Nebula, IC 5146, but it was done with my Celestron Powerstar III C8 and I was pretty sure I could do much better with my current equipment. I ended up gathering 4 1/2 hours of color data and another 55 minutes of luminosity data.
In processing, the synthetic luminosity data from the RGB (weighted 1:1:1) and the real luminosity data were about equally good. The combined result was clearly better than both.
I had previously imaged the Cocoon Nebula, IC 5146, but it was done with my Celestron Powerstar III C8 and I was pretty sure I could do much better with my current equipment. I ended up gathering 4 1/2 hours of color data and another 55 minutes of luminosity data.
In processing, the synthetic luminosity data from the RGB (weighted 1:1:1) and the real luminosity data were about equally good. The combined result was clearly better than both.
I finally was able to finish up the color processing and combine it with the L data and was pretty pleased with the result.
In terms of equipment, I turned up the heat a little further on the Dew-Not DN09 dew strip and it did a great job of keeping the mirrors completely free.