Friday 6 August 2010

In a galaxy far far away

I was saying the other night to a fellow member at our societies observatory that I shall spend the rest of the summer taking obscure faint fuzzies as most of the big and bright objects have been covered. Then Barry says well there is always room for improvement. True I said especially as I now have the field flattener so I think it may be the time to improve on a few of the objects previously imaged and cropped considerably because of coma. I was going to image the Cocoon nebula last night then realised that imaging at the near verticle will cause the camera to hit the mount. I could see the Andromeda galaxy naked eye well above the neighbours rooftop so I thought yeah lets have ago. Seven seconds later I was focused and set up a run of 90 pics. I didnt bother firing up the guider as I have no problems with 60 second exposures when facing east.

Comparing it to the previous image a bit further down the blog I am very pleased that there has been no cropping and a greater depth of focus has returned a very pleasing result.





Object: M31 The Andromeda Galaxy


Type: Galaxy

Constellation: Pegasus

Instrument: William Optics Megrez 90mm, William Optics MkIII field flattener.

F/stop: 5.52

Exposure: 1 hour 23 minutes

IS0: 1600

Date: 05/06/Aug/2010

Location: Saham Toney Norfolk.
Enhancement: Images Plus 3.82 DDP stretch and 3 Sharpening iterations.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Malcolm,
You've got a good image there, proper shaped stars to the frame edge. Dusty lanes and the cores not blown. Well done.

Regards
Dave

malcolm said...

Hi Dave, Thanks for the feedback comments always appreciated. As I mentioned it would be nice to re do previous images with the field flattener. Have a realy good balance at the mo so not bothering with guider just stacking the shorter images.

Loving your work too keep it going.

Malc

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