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Captured in Anglesey under a 98% waxing moon.

• Altair Lightwave 66ED

• Celestron AVX mount

• QHY5LII-M camera

• IR cut filter

• 2 alignment stars + 4 calibration stars + All Star Polar Align

• Focus with Bahtinov mask

• 60 lights unguided + 50 darks + 100 flats

• Calibrated, registered, stacked in Siril 0.9.9 + GIMP 2.10 final processing.

Dave

For anyone starting out, the settings in bold are the ones that matter. In this case minimum gain and offset gave a decent histogram.

[QHY5LII-M]
Output Format=FITS files (*.fits)
Binning=1x1
Capture Area=1280x960
Colour Space=MONO16
Pan=0
Tilt=0
Force Still Mode=Off
Enable Live Broadcast=Off
USB Traffic=50
Speed=1
Offset=1
Amp Noise Reduction=On
Frame Rate Limit=Maximum
Gain=1
Exposure=60000
Timestamp Frames=Off
Contrast=0
Brightness=0.063251089016726
Gamma=1
Apply Flat=None
Subtract Dark=None
#Black Point
Display Black Point=0
#MidTone Point
Display MidTone Point=0.5
#White Point
Display White Point=1
TimeStamp=2018-08-29T23:44:22.3259025Z
SharpCapVersion=3.1.5193.0

that came out very nicely balanced!

Thanks Minos.

I thought the moon in close proximity might affect the capture but then clear skies helped. With the new (to me) AVX mount I am having good success with unguided tracking for 60s exposures over a period of 1 hour.

I have experimented with and without the IR cut filter and found that its use does significantly reduce star 'blooming'.

I have now settled on Siril https://www.siril.org/ and Gimp https://www.gimp.org/ for my processing. Both applications have excellent documentation and the price is right. Gimp 2.10 now fully supports 16-bit images.

Dave