This has been my great white whale for the last couple of months. It’s in the south in the winter which makes it tricky from my back yard. Last night I went to a nearby park where I have a view to the south over farmland. With the snow gone I was able to get 30 100 second subs at 800 ISO through the william optics z61(360mm f/6). I had to stand for the better part of an hour blocking a streetlight but it seemed worth it. There was a pretty strong gradient in the subs but I found a new siril script that seems to do a good job knocking down gradients. Probably a few weeks ago at the last new moon would have been better but i’ll take this for now. The blotch at around 2 o’clock is dust that wasn’t mitigated by my flats. Besides the script I would have used siril’s auto-stretch histogram, the asinh function to raise the blackpoint and colour saturation to boost the colour.

I’ve been looking lately at all-in-one astrophotography solutions like stellina or the EVscope. It’s not that i can’t get decent results but it’s a lot of hacking around in the field and after the fact.