Is deep sky possible with a planetary camera?

It's been a while since that experiment, but now I've finally gotten around to writing a few lines and posting the resulting image here (after losing track of it again).

Well equipped by Karl Kloss: with an AVX, an ASI 178MC, an ASI Air Plus, and a TS60 APO (red line), I embarked on this experiment.
The light pollution situation is pretty bad where I live. To the south are two coal mining areas, and to the east AND west, Rheinbraun mines coal with plenty of light, even at night. My exposure times are therefore very limited. If I expose too long, the image quickly fades into gray. So I decided to work without guiding and "only" with live stacking. Admittedly, I hadn't installed the tracking unit yet, but I wanted to get started right away.
A single exposure time of 10 seconds should be sufficient to:
1. gather enough light onto the chip through live stacking, given the Orion Nebula's good surface brightness, with a total exposure time of approximately 15 minutes;
2. avoid burning out the center of the nebula, which can easily happen. And I simply didn't feel like compositing two images with different exposure times, one for the center and one for the rest – I confess.

So I set the exposure time to 10 seconds and the gain to 190 (using the Asi Air camera). I then saved the stacked image after 5 minutes. A few attempts failed because an airplane with beautiful, bright position lights flew through right there. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to press "save" beforehand. This is clearly a shortcoming of the live stack – if you fly through such a technological marvel at a spacetime of 4:50 or so, you can start again from scratch! Scotty, beam me up!

In total, I managed 13 minutes and 20 seconds before the clouds put an end to the endeavor. And lo and behold: I'm amazed and very pleased with the result. Of course, I edited it with Photoshop CS2 (free and 20 years old ;-) and Affinity (newer, though: the program is 3 years old) – both programs are good and very usable. Yes, see the picture...

Thanks again to Karl Kloss, who gave VERY good advice regarding the equipment. He checked the refractor and it arrived in excellent condition!

Best wishes and encouragement to everyone to try out something a little less "normal" sometimes.
Reinhard Pankrath