NGC1333

I had 40 free credits with the remote telescope service telescope.live and since I haven't had a clear sky night in the last three months or so, I thought I'd have a go! I've chosen the 10cm refractor telescope SPA-1 in Spain (Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4) with an FLI PL16083 camera; with about 30 minutes of available total exposure, it was either about picking an easy target such as M45 or trying something more challenging...I went for the latter and picked #NGC1333, a very interesting object that I've been wanting to image for a while. It was kind of fun trying to squeeze in 30 minutes RGB acquisitions + luminance + Hydrogen-alpha. First of all, I decided not to collect the green channel and to synthesize it in post-processing from the red and blue channels, that would give me more room for the luminance and H-a collections. I ended up with 3x60s for R and B channels each, 10x60s luminance and 3x300s H-a. The H-a collection was pretty much a waste of time, it's very weak and doesn't add much to the final image, so the final image is the result of just about 15 minutes of exposure!!! After I submitted the request it took just a bit more than a week to have it completed, which amongst all the hiccups one can find doing astrophotography doesn't seem the worst! The only kind-of-disappointing thing is the calibration frames, which don't seem to be of much use...I've downloaded both the masters and the raw individual frames and neither the flats or the darks seem to apply the right correction to the light frames using Deep Sky Stacker...perhaps I just need to learn how to use properly. All in all the telescope.live experience was fun and rewarding...although I don't think I will ever have sufficient funds for a whole data collection!