Unguided Beauty

Incredible.

Noticed we had a surprising clear sky for once, even with a partial Moon approaching its first quarter in the Southwestern sky. Orion big and bold rising in the East, simply begged to photographed. Having little opportunity this year for much astrophotography, the prospect sounded wonderful to me.

Started snapping frames around 8pm, Moon set sometime after 11pm, and continued collecting frames until about 2am. Fantastic! A personal best, 458 unguided frames collected, just shy of 2 hours of effective exposure with the self-modified Canon 450D.

Actually, the nights activities produced over 500 frames, but after examing EACH one I had to throw out 50 due to undesirable motion effects...which is a bit on the high side. Not sure why. Temperature and slight wind maybe? Clumsy astrophotographer? Hmmm.

Wonderful thing about collecting more signal with the modified camera, the process provides more information to stretch out after the data fusion (preprocessing, aligning, stacking). A simple curve stretch after DDP processing and voila!

First light with AT8RC

First night out was a bit awkward, as my first target was cut short by some poor planning on my part. Had I realized before I started that the camera was going to travel right on into the tripod in just 100 or so frames, I would have just taken all the pictures on the other target. Honest, I wasn't drinking. Guess I was just a tad bit excited.

As such, 100 or so frames were certainly not enough to produce good results, but 200+ frames were just fine for a reshoot of the Pinwheel Galaxy, Messier 33 (M33).

Roughly half the diameter of our own Milky Way galaxy, M33 is a mere 3 million light years distant. Certainly nothing like "Five Million Years to Earth." This shoot was unguided, with 237 x 15 sec. JPEG frames, using a modified Canon 450D DSLR. Calibrated, stacked, DDP and unsharp mask applied using Nebulosity.

I love the improved magnification at prime focus with this scope...encourages me to go after some of the more smaller galaxies that I used to have second thoughts about.