I invited my friend Emily out, since it was a weekend night, and she’d expressed interest in coming
even just to enjoy the stars and take some long-exposure Milky Way images on her DSLR. It was fun having her out there. I already had my gear set up, so I just had
to reconnect and rearrange everything from where I’d stored them underneath of
covers. I did also re-align though,
because I suspected that I’d accidentally used the wrong star for polar
alignment – and this did indeed turn out to be the case. After that, guiding and tracking went
smoothly. I decided just to do one
target, since I was going to do a half-night and leave around midnight: the
Bubble Nebula again. So I took
30x5-minute exposures. They came out
well, but the result was super noisy from me suppressing background and
bringing out signal. I might re-process
it and see if I can do any better.
Bubble Nebula, Nikon D5300 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer, Orion Skyglow filter
Guiding: QHY5 on my Orion ST-80
22x300s, ISO-3200
Also, for
the record, saturated stars look way cooler
on Newtonians with the diffraction spikes than on SCTs with the weird glowy
donut.
While the pictures were going, I set up my binoculars on a tripod I bought from a guy at the star party I went to recently, finally!
Man is the view fantastic through those.
I also set up my D3100 (which I think I’ve decided to keep for doing
wide-field images while I do telescope imaging to keep me occupied) on a tripod with the
300mm lens in a super-short exposure experiment of the Plediades Cluster. I went and adjusted it every few minutes,
since it was just on the tripod, and I stacked like hundreds of them, but it
came out terribly. Oh well, it was a
good experiment nonetheless.
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