M81 on LX10 EMC

Continuing a number of days of collection of M81 + M82 on the Meade LX10 SCT with the Celestron 0.63 focal reducer (1250mm @ F6.3), the Canon T3I with Astronomik CLS EOS clip-in filter.

This includes collection with M81 & M82 on 2/20 (15x at 100s), 3/5 (112 at 120s) and 3/6 (52x at 300s). Collection on 3/3 was centered on M81 only (114x at 120s). The Orion C10 Newtonian also collected with M81 centered on 3/7 (92x at 120s).

Tonight's collection started off with an initial alignment via polar scope that produce a remarkable result of 0.67" polar alignment error in PHD2's drift alignment tool.

After manually focusing on Procyon using the live display, performed at 10s capture in the Ekos/Indi focus tool... just to see what metrics it produced.  Procyon itself measured 24.91 but the 5 other stars with measurements included 2.44, 2.99, 2.47, 2.71 and 2.46. 

Started processing in a demo / trail version of PixInsight.  After a week's work...gave up.  No usable results. Once again, purchased a one year rental license for Astro Pixel Processor, and ended up with a satisfactory result.  Used mosaic mode to pull together all the LX10 light frames (centered over M81 as well as those light frames centered between M81 and M82).  Because of the coma, did not select 'same camera' option.  Co-registering all the frames required nearly a week of computation on 32-core, 128GB workstation... but result was reasonably good.  Final pixel polishing and level setting in the GIMP.



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