Hi All,
The run continues. Coming up on 7 days clear in Sydney now, although I have only imaged on three of them and slept the other nights instead
On Saturday Night, I had unprecedented tracking which allowed me to easily capture 5 minute subs which, after 2 hours on this target, I decided to stretch out to 10 mins per sub.
NGC6744 - Galaxy in Pavo, 25 - 30 million Light Years distant, an interesting subject with a distinctive central bar and one of the "most" similar type structures to the Milky Way galaxy. Captured on the 6th July, this picture is a total exposure of 2 hours and 50 minutes, comprising 22 x 5 min and 6 x 10 min exposures stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and captured with an Atik 314L+ CCD camera through an 8" Newtonian Reflector on an HEQ5Pro.
I hastily repositioned my primary mirror to take up some slop on the screws, which seemed to have caused some funny gradients combined with my all too present skyglow. It just so happened that my laser collimator decided to spit the dummy with its batteries so I had to eyeball it as fast as I could while the little red dot faded into nothing.....
My longest exposure to date, not perfect, but I am happy with 2 hours and 50 minutes of exposures and how it came up, as this was quite faint even with the autostretch on in the capture program.
Processed in DSS and CS3.
Uncompressed version on Dropbox
here
Cheers
Chris