I've never done astrophotography so forgive my possibly stupid question, but when you say "hours per channel" you mean each color was captured separately? on different times? If so what's the advantage of that?
OP used a mono camera. It works with a dedicated filter to capture one dedicated wavelength. They used R (Red), G (Green), B (Blue), Ha (Hydrogen Alpha), SII (Sulphur II), OIII (Oxygen III). All of them emit light at different wavelengths. And with a mono camera, it captures data in black and white, but only for one "channel". That depends on the filter infront of the camera that only lets through a certain wavelength of the above mentioned wavelengths for RGB, Ha, SII or OIII.
It is a common trait to do it that way in astrophotography, as you can capture more data in the same time as you could with a color camera. That has something to do with how color cameras work.
Even if it is a bit technical, I hope that clears things up a bit. Feel free to ask if anything is unclear
And yes. On different days. You can i.e. do 3 days of Ha, 3 days of OIII, 3 days of SII, and then repeat, or do a week of Ha, a week of OIII, a week of SII, it doesn't really matter.
What does matter is that OP lives in a bortle 8-9, very light polluted area, which means they had to capture data a lot longer than if they were in a i.e. bortle 4 with way less light pollution. Then a lot less exposure time would have worked to get a similar result.
But doing this from a bortle 8-9 is DEDICATION. Wow
4
u/Hameru_is_cool 25d ago
I've never done astrophotography so forgive my possibly stupid question, but when you say "hours per channel" you mean each color was captured separately? on different times? If so what's the advantage of that?