NGC 2264 and some improvements to the ZWO AM5

After a period of suffering (in terms of clear night skies) of almost three months, I was a bit surprised when the weather forecast showed me a clear week. Of course this happened when the moon was full, but after the long wait I was really happy to be able to place the telescope back on the balcony.

I used the time in between to make a few improvements to the AM5. As written in my review, it does a good job, but there have always been slight problems with deflections and tracking accuracy.
In a first step, I used the 3D printer to print spacer rings between the dovetail bar and the telescope.

I had the problem several times when slewing that the distance between telescope and mount was so small that the telescope could have hit or cables could have been pinched. Due to the increase, cable management is now much easier and errors are almost impossible.

I also gave up the nice and handy carbon tripod. Unfortunately, it was much too susceptible to wind and other shocks. I exchanged it for a simple Skywatcher tripod of the EQ5 class, which now offers much more stability.

Despite the moon and the light pollution, which was always acute for me, the seeing was good throughout the week. And with the small improvements, my AM5 was able to consistently achieve guiding values ​​of around 0.2-0.5" without any spikes.
I only had to sort out 2 of the 622 pictures taken.

NGC 2264 has been an object I've been wanting to image for a long time, with only moderate success so far. Now I was able to photograph vast amounts of gas in 622 individual images. The star cluster is about 2500 light years away from us.

In total I was able to photograph 210x300 sec H-alpha, 142x300 sec O-III and 90x60 sec each in RGB, resulting in a total exposure time of 33.8 hours.

The colors come from combining Ha as red and green and O-III as green and blue. The stars are recorded in RGB.