This image is very similar to an image in this gallery made in January 2019 which was the first light image with our then-new Kepler 4040 camera. Almost 5 years later it has been replaced with a Moravian C5A-100M camera, and since the season was about the same, I chose this object as the first light again. This image is almost the First Light image: a previous image of the same object in LRGB is actually the real First Light but these data were taken in the following days and so are quasi-first-light.

There's a fair amount of data in this image, though the exposures are 300 s (and some are only 150 s). I have learned that generally I need to increase the exposures for this camera (though I haven't yet got any examples of this) so overall I'm rather pleased with the performance here.

For this image I've experimented with a new workflow, using Russel Croman's StarXTerminator process in PixInsight to allow me to process stars and nebula separately. I haven't got it working optimally yet, and need to improve my technique: brighter stars are leaving artefacts. But despite this, it is an interesting way to process, and I'm generally optimistic. With less bright stars it would work even better.

I am having an unexpected issue with this camera though: the images are 105 Megapixels, so staying within the 3 Mb upload limit here is a struggle. For this image (where the original JPEG is 11 Nb with quality 10) I have done some serious cropping and reduced the JPEG quality to 4 to fit the limit. It's a pity.