Last night I tried a widefield approach with the camera gear I already have. I used the Laowa macro lens at 100mm and F4 capturing 2 hours at ISO 800. The EQ mount was an Explore Scientific Iexos 100 PMC Eight. No calibration frames used in WBPP in PixInsight.

There was plenty of coma creeping towards the middle for quite a distance, A little of this has been cropped but the remainder has been tamed a bit by blur exterminator, playing with different iterations of sharpening and halo increase. It took a while for SPCC to have a go at colour calibrating it a bit because there were so many stars. I waited patiently for it to finish after 10 – 15 minutes.

Other processes and scripts were StarXterminator, NoiseXterminator, Seti Astro Statistical stretch on starless and Starstretch on the stars. The star stretch was increased above the default value of 5 up to 7 to make them stand out a little against the background. This also had the advantage of boosting some colour in the stars. Stars and Starless recombined iwth bill Blanshan Pixelmath.

The Pelican and North America Nebulae are clear with the Crescent Nebula just showing itself down to the right and bottom left on the edge is a part of the Eastern Veil Nebula. I was quite surprised at how much coma BlurXterminator could deal with. one problem with the small imaging rig was no ability to rotate. I told N.I.N.A to accept a tolerance of 90 degrees.

It may be worth spending some more time with this and with BlurXterminator’s help I may even get the coma on my Canon 100 – 400 under control. The 100-400 can rotate easily.

by Barry Trudgian