I pushed my FSQ to f/8 with the Extender-Q 1.6x for this one. I was my first attempt with this setup because I was having a lot of tracking issues with my G11. I was getting RMS of 1.5" and peaks of 4". Not great at f/8! After a full clean and relube, lots of fiddling, and ajustment of the worms (boy, was that part frustrating), I now have it down to an RMS of (mostly) just under 0.5" and peaks of 1.5".... but this is still a difficult image scale for my telescope/camera combo. Despite better tracking, careful polar alignment, dithering, and 2x drizzle, the still stars came out a little "fat", and there's lots of noise in the final image. Unexpectedly (for me at least) the gradients and edge dropoff was much worse at this focal length. The flats did a lot of work, but there's still a lot going on in the final image. Still... Lessons learned and next I'm going to try for M81/M82 with this setup.
Taken from a Bortle 5 suburban back yard.
Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 at f/8 with the Extender-Q 1.6x.
SBIG ST-8300M at 1x1 binning, with the FW5-8300 5 position filter wheel.
IDAS LPS-D3 36mm unmounted filter for luminance and Astronomik Deep-Sky 36mm unmounted RGB filters.
Losmady G11 Gemini 2, guided with a piggybacked AstroTech 65EDQ and an Orion StarShoot autoguider.
Software included PHD2 for guiding, Sequence Generator Pro for acquisition, and PixInsight for image processing.
90 x 120s luminance integrations (IDAS LPS-D3)
90 x 120s each red, green and blue filters
