I’m really excited about how this photo came out. I had been planning to collect on the Crab Nebula, but this is small target, so I went up to my 8 inch SCT scope to take advantage of the much longer focal length. Unfortunately the first night I tried was a string of equipment malfunctions, and I managed to collect less than 30 minutes of usable data over 4 hours. I decided to pack it in around 1am, and figured I was done, because there were clouds forcasted for the next 10 days. I worked out the bugs over the next few day or two and would be ready when the clouds broke. Somewhat fortuitously, a few nights later I stepped outside around 10pm on what was forecasted to be partly cloudy to absolutely top notch conditions. This night was a complete mirror image of the previous attempt. I was able to quickly set up, align, and begin collecting data. I collected a little over 5 hours of data with the the dual-narrowband filter.
Post-processing also exceeded my expectations. As I mentioned previously, with some new techniques for PixInsight, I was ready to go. As I stepped through my process, everything was textbook, a good number of tools just did a fantastic job with the defaults, and was thrilled with the final result. Below is a zoomed in image.
Sweetman Astrophotography 
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