Astronomy can be feat or famine, and after a very long spell of cloudy and wet conditions another clear night allowed further testing of the society's SmartEye unit with my SW Esprit 80ED scope. Over the course of the night I was able to gain more experience with being able to find and locate fainter targets with reference to star charts, which is now needed following the unit no longer having auto gain and only able to chill down to zero C in standalone mode making fainter targets more difficult to see. My perseverance paid off with successful captures to the unit's SD card of the Rosette nebula, the Leo triplet of galaxies, Jupiter and its Galilean moons and the Great Orion and Running Man nebulae using both the L-Pro and L-eNhance filters. All data were stacked in DSS, with processing completed in Pixinsight and Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop 2026

Exposures details etc. were as follows:

Click on an image to get a closer view

M42 and Running Man nebulae: - 51.5 mins of RGB (L-Pro filter) using 30s subs – Some 90% of the total frames were stacked due to clouds affecting capture. A further 37 minutes of narrowband data using the L-eNhance data using 30s subs were added to make a combined 89 minute total exposure blended image.

Jupiter and the Galilean moons: Just 3 minutes of RGB data were acquired using the L-Pro filter with 5s subs. An unedited stack and a contrast reduced version were produced showing the over exposed plane and the 4 Galilean moons. From bottom left to diagonally right the moons are in order: Callisto, Europa, Io and Ganymede

Rosette nebula (NGC2237 with open cluster NGC2244: 31 mins of RGB (L-Pro filter) data comprising 30s subs were stacked and a further 50 minutes of 30s narrowband data using the L-ENhance filter were compiled. The narrowband data were then blended with the RGB data set to produce a combined RGB/narrowband image of 81 minutes total exposure.



Leo triplet of galaxies: 29 minutes of RGB (L-Pro filter) data comprising 30s subs were stacked and a further 36 minutes of 30s narrowband data using the L-ENhance filter were stacked separately and then blended in to the RGB data set to produce a combined RGB/narrowband image of 65 minutes total exposure.

Chris Bowden