Pacman

First (almost) light with my CCD-camera. I bought it at NEAF in 2014, but haven't really gotten around to start using it. I even bought a set of Baader NB filters and a wheel. But it had mostly been sitting there unused. On Sunday, the skies clear. Sort of. and I wanted to give it a try. After some checking on starmaps, I found that the Pacman nebula would be nice. Using my 71mm apo refractor, the field would be a bit larger than the nebula, so it would be nicely framed. The chip on the CCD is so small compared to the DSLR that I had a hard time finding and framing the object. It took me a while to get used to working with the "straw-view" of the skies. But I finally found the image on my screen. And I set up a sequence of images to be taken before I went to bed. Let the autoguider do its work and hoped the morning would find a nice image.
I had set up a sequence of 48 5-minute frames through a Baader H-alpha filter. I stacked them, and the image was far from good. When I got back from work, I checked through the images, and found that 16 of them either had bad guiding or had clouds drifting through them. I removed them and restacked. Much better. But still not what I had hoped. I figured that what was missing, was dark frames. The next night, I put the camera in a small plastic box (without lid) outside, set the temperature to the same as the night before (-15C) and let it run through a sequence of darks during the night (which was cloudy). 50 darks each for 30s, 1, 2 and 5 minutes. I picked the 5 minute darks and restacked the image with darks and the flats I had taken the morning of the imaging session. MUCH better. The following is therefore the first "real" light of my new camera. I am hoping for more clear nights in the months ahead so I can gain some experience using CCD with a filter wheel.

Tech details : Atik 420M camera, 32x5 min binning 1x1 through Baader 7nm H-alpha filter. William Optics 71mm f/4.9 5-element flatfield apo, Celestron AVX mount. Guided with QHY 5II and PHD. Stacked with DSS, DDP in FitsLiberator. Enhancements in PS and Irfanview.