If you practice astronomy in regions like the Black Forest in Germany, you quickly learn to take advantage of the few situations in which the weather cooperates for this hobby.
The question of whether a mono astronomy camera is the right one for simple hobby astrophotographers is therefore not always easy to answer. Because the effort behind a color image that was made with a color camera (one shot color) initially seems to be significantly less than creating a color image with a mono camera.
In my last attempts out of the city, I collected well over 20 or even over 30 hours of exposure time. In addition to the series of shots per filter, I also collected several hours of RGB data for the stars. So it took me more than 2 months for my last picture to have enough clear nights.
I really enjoyed the project, but I still had the feeling that I used to be able to produce a lot more images in the same amount of time with an OSC camera.
But that's exactly why I switched to a mono camera, to be able to produce more quality than quantity even under difficult lighting conditions.
Nevertheless, I was interested in a project from the beginning to find out what kind of result you can achieve with a mono camera in one night, similar to an OSC camera.
For this I chose an object that can be observed from my location almost the whole night. The choice fell on a wide field image with the combination of the Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443) and the Monkey Head Nebula (NGC 2174). The Jellyfish Nebula is likely the remnant of a supernova, a stellar explosion at the end of a large star's life cycle.
The Monkeyhead Nebula is a large and bright gas cloud surrounding several young stars.
I find the combination of an object that is the remnant of a dead star and a nebula that is made to shine by young, newborn stars particularly interesting as a pair of opposites.
However, the decisive point for the selection of the object was that both targets were visible to me from the onset of darkness around 6:00 p.m. until close to sunrise, more precisely at 4:00 a.m. This resulted in about 10 hours of possible exposure time for my project.
The precise ZWO AM5 mount ensured that no images had to be thrown away due to incorrect tracking.
In the end it was about 9 hours exposure time with about 3 hours each for the filters SII, Ha and OIII.
A huge advantage has resulted from the good Antlia 3nm Pro filters and the mono camera. I could also use the images where the object was only just above the horizon. The quality of these wasn't as good, but the signal was still strong enough. This would probably not have been possible with an OSC camera without a filter.
Admittedly, I had to do a lot more editing with this picture than with the pictures that were taken over several nights. I'm still surprised by the result. I didn't think that with about 3 hours per filter, so much signal would come out.
SII and Ha responded very well. The OIII channel is unfortunately a bit weak, of course you could have gotten a lot more out of it with a longer exposure time.
The star colors are of course not really optimal without RGB data. But for just one night of recording, I'm still reasonably happy.