[Mickoid (Michael)]

My first go at NGC 3242 and I wasn't sure how it would turn out. Firstly, this thing is small, very small. I was going to try it with my SW Esprit 100 but I thought 550mm of focal length would be wasting my time, so I shot it at 1000mm focal length instead. Seeing was pretty good early this morning and after the moon had set I started exposing but as per usual about 20 subs into the session high cloud rolled in to spoil the party. So after throwing away 7 of them due to bad tracking ( balance issues I think ), I ended up with 13mins of unguided 1min subs at 800 iso through the 8 inch Newt using a modded Canon 550d.

Despite it's size, it's surprisingly bright and initially when I sent the Heq5 pro mount using GOTO to this object, I thought it ( or me! ) had made a mistake, as all I could see on my test shot was a bright star like object in the middle of a black void.

The photo on the left is the full frame showing how small it is and obviously the one on the right is a cropped version from the full frame.