There's nothing like a holiday at new Moon to the superb skies near Coonabarabran ... and virtually no clouds in the sky all week! I spent one night basically just looking at the Milky Way
. Obviously nobody in the Coona area bought new gear last week
.
This is probably the best I'll do with my current equipment on the Lagoon, Trifid and NGC6559 complexes. Canon EOS 60D with 55-250mm lens at 250mm, mounted on an iOptron Skytracker, at f/7.1 and ISO640. A stack of 38 x 2-minute exposures, making my first >1-hour integration time. It's also my first foray into PixInsight, which seems pretty impressive software, though I did do a little fine-tuning and sharpening in Photoshop too as my PI kung fu wasn't quite up to the finishing touches!
Apart from the obvious familiar nebulae, I was interested to learn about a tiny red speck near the S-nebula B303 and NGC6559. Not an imaging artefact
. The red speck is apparently
M 1-41, according to detective work by Ray (Shiraz), and you can read lots more about that one on Ray's post (and a far superior image of it) from this time last year.
A larger version of the full image is in my gallery here.
A full resolution version of NGC6559 and surrounds
A full resolution version of M20 & M21
A full resolution version of the Lagoon
Any comments, criticisms or tips are welcome!