CONDITIONS

Shooting from South Essex, Bortle 5. I live very near to a sports stadium (huge floodlights) and behind a horse mènage (floodlights) and both my neighbours have rear floodlights in their gardens which they regularly use at night. And I have a very bright sodium streetlight shining into the garden. South view looks out over the bright lights of Southend area. Weather/cloud/strong jetstream/wind conditions are generally awful for most of the time. So these are very much real world conditions!

EQUIPMENT

Most of my equipment is second hand, I do what I can within my light budget.

Deforked 2004 Meade 14" LX200, focal length 3556mm (2240mm with 0.63 reducer for most shots) on 2016 Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount. It's an old scope and the mirror could do with a polish - it's a bit hazy. I deforked the scope myself so I can run autoguiding and balance it properly. Deforking took just 15 minutes. Scopes on forks have 'absolutely useless' balance and in my opinion should not be used for imaging unless subs are under 20s.

A word on the mount - it's all I could afford - if you have the money I would not recommend using such a feeble mount for imaging with such a huge scope. No problem at all for visual work but I am right on the very limit of this Chinese made mount for imaging. Perhaps one day I will get something proper, it would no doubt improve my imaging. PHD guiding shows considerable Dec backlash issues on this mount. It's not very good.

All mounted on Altair pier in roll roof wooden shed

Starlight Xpress Trius Pro SX694 with Starlight Express 7 position 1.25" mounted motorised filter wheel. Astrodon E-Series LRGB filters and Astrodon 3nm OIII and Ha narrowband. Sub lengths: L 75s R 92s G 93s B 74s. Ha/OIII 180s.

Borg 77EDII used as the guide scope, piggyback on the main scope. Altair GPCAM3 178M guide camera. PHD2 autoguiding.

SHOOTING

Almost all of my shots are in the region of 3 hour total integration time - being 30 mins each for RGB and 1.5hrs luminance. I do not have the time or opportunity to spend crazy hours imaging single targets over many nights. Or the weather! So again - I consider these shots to be what is actually achievable for most folk, on a fairly tight budget, and still be able to get up for work :-)

Image capture via Maxim DL and processing in Photoshop after Maxim DDP and stretch/conversion in FITS liberator. Overall I have fairly basic processing skills - there's not a lot of fancy tricks going on here.

Note my stars are always bloated, and not that round at this focal length!

I've worked hard to get the pier level and solid, and borrowed a Polemaster camera to get my alignment as good as I could on their software over many attempts. When I run PHD tools it comes back with alignment error of around 0.5 minutes and on decent nights I am getting around 0.5 RMS error on guiding (on the Borg scope focal length 510mm)