Friday, November 26, 2021

Andromeda Galaxy

I have been trying to get a close-up shot of Andromeda for a while now, and finally had success last night.


It is barely a smudge of very faint lightness where we live, even knowing precisely where to look. So pointing the camera at a very faint and very small object - I've not had success getting it framed before tonight.

This is the final image, representing about an hour of exposure time stacked into a 3-minute exposure. The stacking helps remove noise - if our eyes could hold three minutes of light, this is what we'd see. I would have had four hours to play with, but clouds developed in the process. That left me with nearly 2 hours, but those either had motion artifacts (star tracker isn't perfect, amplified by zooming in) or satellites zooming through, for a 50% success rate - actually pretty good!

I can't wait to give this a try again under truly dark skies!

Cheers,

Marc

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