M20 Trifid Nebula

M20 Trifid Nebula

Captured mainly from April to July 2026 at my new location, Bortle 6, instead of the previous Bortle 8 near the city center. My new homemade (pre-production prototype) mount on 40mm reducers holds the tube like cast concrete in any wind, and when turbulence allows, the guiding RMS graph stays at 0.25-0.30". I did have to struggle a bit with OnStep firmware issues when parking to the south pole. But overall I managed to gather about 30 hours of LRGB and 20 h-alpha

Imaging was done with APT, calibration and processing with my open-source library of command-line utilities Pulsar, with scripts being added and fixed on the fly. During post-processing I also used command-line tools (CLI) from the RC-Astro suite - BXT, NXT, SXT.