[Mickoid (Michael)]

Grabbed just under 40mins of this region from my front yard between the trees. Was going to set up the scope but high cloud here in Melbourne on Saturday night made it not worth the effort. Ironically, just before moonrise the Cirrus cloud decided to thin out a bit for a while, so I set up the Nano Tracker on the Manfrotto tripod and shot the Carina region with a 200mm Sun lens ( $80 off Gumtree a couple of years ago ) with the modded Canon 550d and UVIR cut filter.

Was quite pleased with the result given the Bortle 6 skies and light high cloud passing over with a rising moon. I also nailed the polar alignment pretty well because I was able to achieve 1 minute subs with the 200mm focal length lens. I weighed the camera and lens before I started because the Nano Tracker only has a payload of 1.5 kgs, it came in at just under 1.4kgs.

39 x 60sec subs at 1600iso using an external aperture. The cropped version shows a fair amount of detail for such a short focal length cheap lens.