I am just as impressed as you. But it's not just the telescope. The mount and camera pla8a big role the mount is IMO the most important piece

As an aside if anyone wants to see this and a few others I took last night in full resolution, you can find them with annotations here: https://www.astrobin.com/users/rrbailey89/

Thanks for pointing this out, it's absolutely true. I did not think to list that in the title because I wasn't able to get much detail out of them.

For me I am unable to see it unaided. I believe a lot has to do with your local light pollution

I have no idea what your talking about 🤣

I do think that I see some pinpoints there: last night I actually gathered some more data and reedited, if your interested here is the full resolution photo: https://www.astrobin.com/56dgkp/B/ unlike you I am not guiding, nor did I gather anywhere near the amount of data that you did, I do have a guide scope arriving tomorrow, im still a baby in this hobby of mine haha.

I think that if I had taken longer exposures, 1m+ I possibly could have resolved stars closer towards the center, but im also not sure, the center is quite bright.

I'm more concerned that Earth would be affected by the gravity of something else and be slingshot out of the mix

Or a blessing haha, I feel like that would be both beautiful and terrifying.

Equipment:

Mount: EQ6-R PRO

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT60ED

Field Flattener: Astro-Tech AT60FF

Camera: ASI533-MC Pro

Imaging Details:

95 Lights (30 second exposures, 300 gain) 25 Darks 25 Flats 25 Dark Flats

Processing Details:

I first stacked the FITS using DSS and then took the TIFF and used SIRILs scripts to process the image by performing

1. Background extraction
2. Photometric color calibration
3. Then performed an auto stretch
4. Then performed some color saturation

I then took the result from SIRIL and further processed using PhotoShop.

I used the camera raw filter within PhotoShop to:

1. Further tune the saturation and vibrance
2. Make adjustments to the green and blue color channels to turn those down