Already the third bright evening in one month! But this time with full moon, so narrowband it is then. Originally I wanted to do a retake on the Heart and Soul with a my QHY183C and a Zeiss 100mm lens. The Zeiss is easy to focus and has a great aperture of f2. So in a dash of unrelenting optimism I grabbed my Canon 70-200 f2.8 to see what I could get out of that lens with just the heart nebula. Oh dear, I had forgotten that the Canon is built for autofocus and does not leave much room for a dew band. So it took me quite a while to get it focused and when I tried to rotate the lens a bit to get better framing, the dew band made sure I got completely out of focus again
The positive bit was that I managed to get good guiding with the iOptron iGuider, around 0.8” consistently.
After 3.5 hours I thought I had to stop, but I probably could have gone for another hour or so. But then when I looked at the stacked result, I was pleasantly surprised with the number of photons the F2.8 lens had brought in, I was seeing nebulosity which I had never seen before on this subject. I hope you like what I made of it, as I am still working out how to get proper colors in after narrowband normalization. Open to all tips and comments!
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