The skies have been cloudy, or the temperature has been way below normal this winter, I have been unable to image as much as I'd liked. Because of that, I think I'm getting rusty. Although this is a good image, I shot about a dozen frames to get 4 good ones. I had a number of problems imaging this. The scope was unbalanced, because the little refractor is so light weight that the tripod counterweights were too heavy to balance. When I imaged with the object ascending the meridian, everything was fine, but when it was descending, the stars streaked. Polar alignment was pretty good that night. I was able to capture only 2 frames with the scope ascending before I had to do a meridian flip. I did manage 2 decent descending frames out of 10.
This image was the raw monochrome, stacked and enhanced in Photoshop.
Here is the same image using Noel Carboni's 'B&W -> Ha False Color Black Space' tool in his toolkit.
I went back and reprocessed this with some dark frames. Seems the darks increase the noise. The only reason I used them was to eliminate the hot pixels. I seem to like this image better than the above.
