One of the key aspects of high quality astrophotography is the length of integration time: longer integrations allow you to see more details in the processed images. Given the weather in Scotland doesn’t always allow runs of clear nights to gather 10 to 20 hours on a target, another choice is to have multiple smart telescopes imaging the same target.
Over the last week in February, several of us imaged M81 with our Seestars. I combined data from my Seestar with data from Tim Honisett’s and Pat Devine’s Seestars. Nigel Goodman also has data, but I haven’t merged that into the final image yet.
The final image of M81 has just over 9 hours of integration, made up of three and a half hours of 30s exposures from Pat and 5 and a half hours from me and Tim. The RGB colour came from the 5 and a half hour stack, while the luminance was obtained using an HDR combination of the 10s and 30s masters.
The pre-processing and stacking of the image took about 90 minutes on a MacBook M3 using PixInsight.
The details obtained with this route are very encouraging and show that smart scopes are capable of producing impressive images with enough integration time.
Mike Christie