Following Peters advice I considered stacking only 30 frames but as I had 129 I thought no I will stack 95% of them
which is approximately 30
So the sky was better than perfect so I moved closer than usual to the stars probably 20 feet from the house
and captured 129 30 second frames thru my 80 mm Skywhatcher triplet scope riding upon a HEQ 5 Equatorial mount that despite hours of attention did not seem to become correctly polar aligned.
I suspect the mount may be slowly sinking upon the cement pavers I placed to prevent such an event.
The polar align is still out and I cant figure it out and looking at the individual frames they show longish stars but the stack seems to have fixed it a little..how that works I do not know.
Put them in Deep Sky Stacker ( a free software that allows combination of multiple frames into one image) together with 12 dark frames (photos taken with the lens cap on to reveal any non performing pixels) and 18 flat frames (short exposures with a white sheet over the front of the scope designed to show up any unwanted objects in the optical path such as dust on the lens) and 13 bias frames ( taken at a fast shutter speed with the lens cap on to do what I am not entirely sure).
After many hours a final image was worked upon using gimp (a free program to further process an image).
The bottom of the first short was cropped away because it had major problems probably as a result of my large baffeled dew tube moving to obstruct the light coming to the lens at some point during capture...maybe..
The second image is a major crop to see what detail I could get in the galaxy.
Alex
