M11 and M18

Seized upon a great dark night and grabbed these two shots of Messier objects 11 and 18, both open clusters. Messier 11 is known as the Wild Duck Cluster. I understand the bright stars appear to form a triangle like a flight of geese, but..um...I don't see it.

Worked on my image processing some, and in these shots all additional noise reduction on the Rebel T1i was turned off. Camera brightness, contrast, sharpness, and saturation levels were all in standard settings. As such, I took 100 darks and 100 bias frames to perform image calibration during post-processing. This time I did bias correctly by setting camera to the shortest shutter speed, 1/4000. No flats this time, that's for another blog entry.

The following picture of M11 comprises 180 x 15 sec. JPEG frames at 3200 ASA, calibrated with 100 bias frames. Stacked and stretched.

This lovely shot of M18 is 1800 x 15 sec. JPEG frames at 3200 ASA, calibrated with 100 bias and 100 dark frames.