Moon 26th March

 Gutted. I missed an ISS pass, I didn't think to check for one but saw it a second before I clicked record.

Pleased with the final image. I think best 500 frames from about 1500.

M42 The Orion Nebula

A last look at the Great Orion Nebula for a few months. Unfortunately for me it disappears behind the front of the house about an hour past the meridian so a very limited window of capture now in March.

Anyway a short capture of 20 x 180 and 20 x 30 seconds images taken with the ASI294mc pro on the ED100 via the ASI AIR Pro.  Calibrated and stacked in Deep sky stacker and processed in Photoshop. I am always amazed how smooth the result is and even with a huge crop on the Trapezium the resulting image is incredibly clean. One confession to make though for the pixel peepers, the 4 stars of the Trapezium have been made round removing slight halos from processing.

M96 & M105

 The universe never fails to amaze me of it's vast size and complexity. The 4 large galaxies seen here in the constellation of Virgo contain over a hundred trillion stars between them at an average distance of 30 million light years ish. When you look a little closer though you will see 360 small boxes. Hidden behind each one is another galaxy so distant it has taken the light of some over over 12 billion years to reach us. Every other point of light you see here are stars within our own galaxy.