Science lesson! My kids took an online astronomy class about a year ago. As part of the class, they used a remote telescope service called Slooh. Slooh is a fantastic intro to deep sky astronomy for kids. It lets you pick targets then a telescope takes an image and sends it to you. That was great for a while, but my kids wanted to go a bit deeper. So, they each picked targets then selected the photo framing. My son started his project first and chose the Cygnus Wall region in NGC700, the North American Nebula. He programmed the telescope and enjoyed three nights in a row of good weather. We decided to aim for at least 10 hours of data and we passed that comfortably on the third night.

This was imaged over 3 nights in October 2024 from my back yard. This includes 83 images, each 10 minutes long – totaling 13.8 hours of data. I taught my son a basic processing flow using Siril, GraXpert and NoiseXTerminator. He played with pretty much every setting along the way to learn as much as he could about what each tool did. His first “real” astronomy image is above.

Full-sized image here.

The Lightbucket imaging log is here.

Details:
Explore Scientific ED127 refractor
Hotech SCA flattener
STF-8300C camera w/ an L-eXtreme filter
G11 mount on a custom BoldMFG pier
83x 600sec sub-exposures (13.8 hours) from my Bortle ~5 backyard
Captured in NINA
Processed with Siril, GraXpert, Photoshop, NXT

I took a swing at processing the data too and came up with this. (Full-sized image here.)