In retirement, my wife and I plan to do some traveling in our Jayco Class C RV, especially during the winter months when we can temporarily relocate to someplace a bit warmer than the Colorado mountains. However, the winter months are the best time of the year for astrophotography, and I wasn’t thrilled about missing the opportunity for some prime imaging. I decided that it would be a good idea to put together a more portable setup for astrophotography–something that could ride along with us without taking up too much space or weight. When Sky-Watcher announced their new full-goto star tracker, the Star Adventurer GTi, I resolved to give it a go.

After a long summer of short, cloudy evenings, I’m finally back at shooting astrophotographs. In the spring I picked up a new mono camera, the ZWO ASI533MM Pro, and a set of Optolong narrowband filters for hydrogen-alpha (7 nm), sulfur-II (6.5 nm), and oxygen-III (6.5nm). I also picked up the ZWO mini filter wheel so I could automate my filter changes. Last week I finally got them all out for some shooting, and I spent three nights shooting subs of the Cygnus Wall, a star formation region of the North American Nebula (NGC7000) in the constellation Cygnus.

This past week I finally received the brand-new ASI533MM Pro cooled monochrome camera from ZWO. After having used its color brother (the ASI533MC Pro) for over a year now, I was excited when ZWO announced the monochrome version a few months ago. Mine finally arrived, and all I needed was a decent night with clear skies to give it a try. Monochrome imaging is something I hadn’t attempted before, and I was eager to give it a shot.

I was happy to get a few clear nights after the new moon to capture another image, this time the Horsehead and Flame nebulae in the constellation Orion. I was able to use 107 3-min exposures to create the image you see here. It was taken using my Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 f/5.5 apo refractor on an iOptron GEM45 mount, this time using my new Starizona Apex ED-L 0.65x reducer (so the effective focal ratio for this image was f/3.6). The image was captured using my ASI533MC Pro camera with an Optolong L-Pro filter.

After a two-month layoff, I was finally able to try out my new Starizona Apex ED-L 0.65x focal reducer with my Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 refractor. This combination increased my field of view enough that I was able to capture the entire Heart Nebula, and this is the result. The Apex reducer seems to have done a good job at least over the field of view captured by my ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera. The Apex is supposed to handle sensors up to the size of APS-C, but I haven’t been able to test that–yet.

This image was captured with an Optolong L-eXtreme filter and consists of 60 5-minute subs, plus calibration frames. Processed using PixInsight with StarNet++ version 2.0, along with Affinity Photo and Topaz Sharpen AI.

I tried imaging the Heart Nebula about a year ago, when I first started shooting astrophotographs. At that time, I was using an unmodified Canon DSLR (the 250D), and I was still pretty inexperienced in processing my astro data. Unsurprisingly, the result was not great, and I was gun shy about trying to shoot it again. But I gave it a shot again a few days ago, this time armed with a dedicated astro camera (the ASI533MC Pro color camera), an L-Extreme dual-narrow-band filter, and a lot more experience processing images (as well as PixInsight now being in my toolbox). I’m much more pleased with my result this time around.

After shooting the East Veil Nebula a month or two ago, I wanted to come back to more of the Veil Nebula complex in Cygnus and shoot other parts of it. I love the colors and the wispiness of this nebula, and my narrow-band filter does a fabulous job on it, IMHO. By the time I got back to this target, it was high enough in the sky at dusk that I could only shoot it for about four hours a night. I managed to capture a total of seven hours on this target over the course of two nights. This is once again a narrow-band image using the Optolong L-Extreme dual-band filter, shooting with a ZWO ASI533MC Pro cooled color camera through a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 f/5.5 apo refractor on an iOptron GEM45 mount. Processed using PixInsight, Affinity Photo, and Denoise AI.

Back in March of 2021 I captured an image of the Seagull Nebula. The nebula is actually too large for me to capture in a single frame using my current equipment (A Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 f/5.5 refractor with a ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera) so I split the target into four separate frames and then used Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE) and Affinity Photo to combine the frames and create the final image. ICE is a really cool tool, capable of stitching together panoramas and mosaics almost effortlessly, and I’ve used it several times for different projects. I’ve also written previously about Affinity Photo and how it’s an excellent general-purpose image processing tool for a modest cost–an excellent alternative to the pricey Photoshop package. But I’m in the process of transitioning to PixInsight as my main tool for processing my astro images–it’s one of the most popular and powerful tools built specifically for astro image processing–and I wanted to learn how to create a mosaic using PixInsight. So I recycled my Seagull Nebula data from March to see what I could do.

As autumn approaches here in the Colorado mountains, the number of clear evenings gradually increases. Such was last evening, when I was able to set up to capture the East Veil Nebula (NGC 6992) in the constellation Cygnus. I was able to collect 116 good 3-minute subs, plus the usual calibration frames (darks, flats, dark flats, and bias frames), and process the result using PixInsight and Affinity Photo. Subs were captured using an ASI533MC Pro camera with L-Extreme filter through a Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 apo refractor on an iOptron GEM45 mount. I’m decently pleased with the result.