Third attempt

I made a third attempt at Andromeda last night with the Seestar and think this may be incrementally better. It is slightly more tilted than previous attempts, and I cropped it to show M110 at bottom right. I used Siril for stacking and most of the processing, but not the stretching. Research indicated I could just do it in Photoshop, so I did. I also got a small, unimpressive image of the Crab Nebula.

I'm going further down the rabbit hole. I am expecting delivery of a real Goto telescope mount (Skywatcher HEQ5) and a real astro b&w camera (ZWO ASI174MM) today. For now my priorities are to get good Sun and Moon images with the b&w camera and Televue telescope, and get my DSLR to work with the mount to get a tracked LANDSCAPE shot of Andromeda and other objects. Once I get all that figured out, then it's on to a filter wheel, filters, an autofocuser, and perhaps a field flattener to get better images of Seestar targets. First impressions: Learning how to align the mount will require some study and some YouTube videos. The rail supplied with the mount is useless, but my standard tripod plates will work. I only put the camera on the mount, not the scope, and targeting was not very good since the mount was not aligned. On the other hand, the ZWO camera was a breeze to set up and I took a test image (not attached to anything) within minutes. I will try a sun snapshot with the scope tomorrow, but it probably will be on the tripod, not the mount. That thing is heavy. From comments found during my research, I knew it was heavy, but I had no idea. I should take off the 11-lbs. counterweights before I move it. I only needed one to balance the camera, and I wonder if the scope will require both.

October 3 sun image from the 6D, monochrome, colorized. I didn't use the teleconverter, so this is at 400mm and heavily cropped. I used the Photoshop AI Super Resolution to upsize it, then cropped it to my standard 1200x1800 (4x6 print size). We've got some good sunspots going. Remember, this is just a white light filter and doesn't show the detail of much more expensive filtering systems. Can't wait to see what the new ZWO does with the Sun and Moon.