[Mickoid (Michael)]

As the title suggests, I snapped these two before moonrise last night. First time at putting my 8 inch f5 Newtonian on the Heq5 mount. The GOTO made framing the objects easier but my polar alignment wasn't up to scratch for unguided 40 second subs at 1000mm focal length. The eggy stars tell the story of rushing to beat the rising moon. I got up to the viewing site a little later than I wanted to. By the time I had set up to photograph, I only had 1 1/2 hrs of total darkness before the moon would creep over the horizon.

Started with the popular NGC 253 ( 50 x 40sec subs at 1600 and 3200 ISO ) and finished off with NGC 104 ( 10 x varying exposures between 10 and 40 secs at 800 ISO ), processed in DSS and PS. Canon modded 550d using UVIR cut filter. Tracking seemed better on 47 Tuc.