After nearly three months of unrelenting cloudy nights, interrupted only by a clear night on the eve of a full moon, the new moon came with a clear night time sky. I collected several sets of subs, while also running into some unexpected snafus. Digital astrophotography always presents its challenges.
The image above is M-33, the famous galaxy in Triangulum, visible naked-eye from my high mountain site (at least for young folks). While M-33 comes alive for telescopic obsevers only through large apertures (due to its low surface brightness), its face-on appearance makes it an astrophoto show stopper. M-33 is a member of the local group, the third largest after M-31 (tilted at a fifteen degree angle from our perspective) and our own Milky Way (a barred spiral, not nearly as asthetically pleasing, in my opinion, as M-33).
The technical details, briefly, are 15 total subs at 180 seconds, acquired through the StellarVue 115 at f/5.6 using the SBIG ST2000XCM. Initial processing, alignment, combining plus digital development, standard smoothing, star size reduction, sharpening, and curves adjustment in ImagesPlus v7Beta with image size reduction and saving for Web in PhotoShop CS2.
This image is likely the best of the evening, although I collected the subs 1 by 1 with CCDOPs while I fiddled around with CCDSOFT. By about three a.m. I figured out the arcane nuances of CCDSOFT, and finally collected an automated set of subs for M76 using that program.
Max
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