| Date:
| 16/19/22 Sep 2025
|
| Location:
| Kelling Heath Star Party, Norfolk
|
| Exposure:
| 500 x 2min over 3 nights: 2 nights at Kelling Heath and 1 night at home
|
| Telescope:
| Takahashi Epsilon 180ED on Skywatcher EQ6 mount
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| Camera:
| Altair Astro AA24CFX
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| Guiding:
| Nikkor 300mm lens with Altair Astro GP290M camera.
|
| Filters:
| Camera internal IR/UV cut filter
|
| Processing:
| Stacked in PixInsight, white balanced with SPCC, colour correction matrix applied and stretched with Arcsinh Stretch (to preserve hue and saturation) then sRGB gamma curve applied
|
|
| Comments:
| There were a couple of notable problems in processing the data. One of the Kelling Heath nights and the night at home had high level atmospheric haze which gave the stars a diffused "headlamps in the fog" look. Luckily it was possible to use the data from the good night to characterise and remove these halos. The other problem was background extraction because there are no areas free of interstellar dust. Background extraction was therefore a painstaking operation, putting carefully calculated manual values into the sample points of PixInsight's DBE tool.
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