Photos from my fine new camera and my fine old camera
Bode’s is the spiral near the center, to the left is NGC 3034 the Cigar Galaxy. Above to the right is NGC 2976 and below near the triplet is NGC 3077.
This is 45 exposures of 75 seconds each at ISO 800 with my canon t3i and william optics Z61(360/f5). They were stacked and colour calibrated with Siril, autostretched and the black point raised with the asinh processor.
It’s dramatically better than last time i tried this but I still find the images a bit grainy.
Wow – I’m pleased with this. That’s 10 images taken with the Takumar 200mm lens at f/5.6 on the Canon t3i 60 seconds ISO 800 with three darks and one bias. They were stacked in DSS and postprocessed there as well following this tutorial. It’s cropped to about 1/4 of the original. The focus wasn’t perfect, there’s still some Chromatic Aberration, and I’ve probably over-processed it but it’s fine.
Above and to the left of M81 you can see a corner of three stars and, just beyond, a fuzzy patch that is probably NGC3077. M81, M82, and NGC3077 are all about 12 million light years away.
Above Dubhe (the lip of the big dipper) there are two relatively bright galaxies Bode’s Galaxy M81 and the Cigar Galaxy M82. I was hoping I could catch them because they are the same sort of size and brightness as M110 which showed up near the Andromeda Galaxy with the same lens.
This is a single 60 second exposure with the 50mm Canon lens at f/4 and ISO 400. It has been cropped very significantly and poked at with the windows photo tool. In the field I thought this was too blown out so i took 10 30 second exposures and tried stacking them with deep sky stacker but i just wasn’t getting enough light.
The image below is the unmolested original. Obviously I need a longer lens. This is all good fun though. I was pleased that I was able to locate the galaxies by keying off Dubhe and learning to recognize little asterisms like the triplet near the middle of the original below.
Astrophotography Newbie 