Well I ended up giving up on helix because it was too much of a pain to shoot, but here it is: 


Instead, I'm now shooting the Bubble Nebula + Northern Lagoon Nebula + part of the Lobster Claw Nebula

101x300s (8h25m) of hydrogen alpha under 95% illuminated moon, so essentially shot under Bortle 9 skies.

Welp. Weather is not going to cooperate anymore so I'm stopping at 20.25 hours on bubble.

20.25 hours

That is an impressive integration time, and the result looks amazing!

Also (and maybe you've already considered this or have a different philosophy), it might not be a bad idea to put watermarks on your high-res images.  I'd hate to have someone easily steal and profit from your very hard work.  Your images are easily good enough for publication in professional magazines!

If I had a telescope I would love to make a collage of many bright main sequence stars ordered by temperature, so you can have a "main sequence" chart or something like that!

If I had a telescope I would love to make a collage of many bright main sequence stars ordered by temperature, so you can have a "main sequence" chart or something like that!

You can do that with any camera and a kit lens.  I did one of Orion awhile back which included red stars like Betelgeuse, white stars like Sirius and blue stars like Rigel.  I used a wide angle kit lens to get stars of all different spectral types in the same image.  Saturn and Mars were also in the image so I got a full range of colors.

Can anyone explain what are and how to do bias frames for use in software like deepsky stacker?

Can anyone explain what are and how to do bias frames for use in software like deepsky stacker?

here:
http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/f ... flatoffset
I usually just use the Dark Frame Subtraction setting for my camera and then doing these frames becomes unnecessary (but does double the length of the imaging session.)

Here is a single frame of Orion from my bedroom window (with the window closed!) 13 sec ISO 400 f/3.5 at 14mm using the kit lens.

No editing of this jpg, aside from cropping and doing an autolevels

Wont let me post- image is too large (even though I cropped it!)

I put it here:

https://www.astrobin.com/kje32b/

Not enough exposure time for this one. Only 9 min total.  The way the camera was mounted didn't allow to mount the counter weight and with the 600mm lens it struggled to move so the exposures were limited to 2 min each. Had clouds come over too and so I rejected 2/3 of the pics.  Anyway I got somewhat of a result after stacking even though the SNR is pretty poor I feel this is a massive improvement over the last time we tried Orion.

My friend and I went to a hiking trip in true dark sky area of the state , Bortle 0-1 I'd say.

I need to add an auto guider to the mount and sort out the fixing of the camera and counter weight which should allow much longer exposures at lower ISO to get a better total time and SNR.

Nice! Winter is setting in so I think my season is over. Time to go into hibernation until late March

Winter is the best!  It has the longest and clearest nights

Not here it doesn't, too much moisture during winter where I live so the view is always washed out and transmits light pollution worse.

My skies are clearest in summer when the humidity is much lower. We have very dry summers and wet winters here in the southern end of Australia.

Not here it doesn't, too much moisture during winter where I live so the view is always washed out and transmits light pollution worse.

My skies are clearest in summer when the humidity is much lower. We have very dry summers and wet winters here in the southern end of Australia.

Wow I would like that here, in the summer here (which is winter for you) my dew point is above 70 and 75 most of the time

We reach dew point in winter. everything gets condensation on it.  we only get about 20% humidity during summer, winter it sits at 80-100% according to the hydrometer.

It's been happening here especially in the last few summers.  Our previous record of 75+ dew points was 24 days and last summer we somehow had 42 days with a dew point of 75+ and above- blew away the previous record by almost double! It has been slowly increasing since the 70s, but that was a HUGE jump.  In addition, my allergies get worse with the higher humidity and now I take multiple benadryl a week for months, where before I only used to take 1 or 2 for an entire year.