NGC 6744, 6 July 2022

I had a first attempt at NGC 6744 last night in my highly light polluted back yard, looking south over my house. I'm still not happy with my focal reducer, it distorts the edges of the images and produces horrible gradients across the frames that my flats cannot remove. I'm considering dropping it altogether and capturing at the native focal ratio, around f/9 or so.
I only managed 95 x 60 sec frames, but I will probably give it another try soon. Celestron C9.25" SCT on CGEM mount, Canon 700D, Meade f/6.3 focal reducer, ZWO OAG and ASI224MC for guiding, stacked in DSS, processed in Photoshop Elements.

NGC 6744 DSS 1 crop colcorr stretched 3 filtered ps1sm50.png