I imaged this object twice. Once from my back yard about a year ago on a 6" RC telescope with the ZWO ASI1600MM-C and Astrodon filters. Logged about 17.5 hours at that time. Then about two weeks ago, I stayed in the country with my wife, and took the same telescope out there with a new camera to test out...the ZWO ASI071MC-Pro. I logged another 9.5 hours with that setup. Due to the larger sensor size, I got a much wider field of view compared to the 1600. For the image below, I decided to combine data from both sessions for a total of 27 hours. It's cropped to the 1600 sensor size. Moonlite focuser, CCDT67 telecompressor, and CGX are the remainder of the equipment.

WOW! Fantastic image!


Wouter

Great results! (I can only dream of 27 hours on a subject )

By the way, for those who want an inexpensive ASI071, its the same sensor as in the Pentax K-5 (but with cooling) - awesome!

My goodness! 27 hours... I never got past 2 hours! I'm wondering... do you sit by the scope while taking subs or do you sit at a client computer in a warm place? Or, do you set up the system, schedule re-focusing etc. and go to bed? Just curious... Superb image, my congratulations!

Hah, thanks for the compliments. I try not to sit by it all night. I do manually set up the scope each night as I don’t have an observatory, but thanks to the automation I don’t really have to babysit it. Unfortunately there have been some ups and downs with EKOS on the Mac transitioning to 3.1, and some things broke. Meridian flips no longer work for me, and I’m not sure if it’s the CGX driver I started using, or changes to the meridian flip system that are causing it. I used to use the regular Celestron Nexstar driver. So I apparently also have an amazing internal clock in my body, and I’ll look at what time the object is supposed to pass the meridian, and tell myself that I need to wake up at that time and force a flip. And somehow I magically wake up at that time. Haha. But otherwise I could have had more data on the object. Because of general bug issues that pop up every once in a while and cause things to not quite operate as planned and imaging stops unknown to me while I sleep sometimes.

But for the most part, prior to 3.0 I’ve been able to image all night. And I’ll typically spend 2-3 nights on a single object to get sufficient color data and signal.