90% waxing Moon: In the early hours of the 8th June, with the moon low down on the horizon partly obscured by cloud, I used my ASI533MM Pro camera fitted with a Meade Moon filter attached to a Sky-Watcher Esprit 80 ED triplet refractor fitted with a field flattener, to take a one minute SER of the Moon using Astro DMx Capture. Some 15% of the 628 frames were then stacked in Autostakkert!4, wavelet processed in Registax and finished off in Adobe Photoshop 2025 to provide the correct orientation for the moon.
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The Butterfly Cluster (M6): Under poor sky conditions, and with a vantage point partly obscured by grass foliage, I was able to gather just a small amount of LRGB data of this open cluster lying low down in the murk in the constellation of Scorpio. Using my ASI533MM Pro camera and mono filter wheel set attached to a Sky-Watcher Esprit 80 ED triplet refractor fitted with a field flattener, I targeted M6 that was located just a few degrees above the horizon. Due to the grass foliage completely blocking the view of the guide camera, I was only able to shoot 5 x 30s unguided subs on each channel before losing the target completely in the foliage and the murk. I attempted to stack the data in Pixinsight, but due to poor image quality, could only integrate the red and luminance data sets which I merged together and processed as a mono image, having first removed the background artefacts using StarXterminator. I then converted the best single 30s green and blue subs into Tiffs using DSS and then star aligned them with the red and luminance data sets in Pixinsight where I was then able to crop the data and further process it using gradient correction, BlurXterminator, SPCC and StarXterminator to leave an image of just the stars, which I then completed as an LRGB image comprising a total integration time of just 6 minutes. The phone and security camera montage shows the state of sky which appeared to contain possible volcanic dust from recent worldwide eruptions and the low angle the scope was pointed at to acquire the images from the objects low down in the SSW sky. I annotated the wide field mono image in Pixinsight that showed the rich star field in this section of sky proving that even with challenging conditions it is still possible to achieve reasonable imaging results using a range of processing techniques.
Chris Bowden
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