This is the ideal time to look at the new moon and follow it each evening
as it gets fuller and you can see different features each evening.
Saturn rises in the evening, so it would be good for you, and it will blow
your socks off if you haven't seen it through a scope before.
Another great object would be M42 [The Orion Nebula]It's a fuzzy patch
above the three bright belt stars of Orion.
raymo
Eta Carinae is an easy target, large, and directly overhead.
Orion is good, but is getting too low in the west.
Mars rises to a comfortable position around 9pm onwards.
47 Tuc is also worthy of consideration.
Do a virtual tour through Stellarium or similar and see which ones you can target.
Good luck!
Bo
If you stay up late, or wait another couple of months then the galactic centre (Scorpius/Sagittarius region) is brimming with amazing sights to photograph. Pretty much just point the camera up and have at ye! The area around
Antares is crazily colourful and doesn't need a long focal length (max 200mm) but does need exposure time and dark skies to really look great.
The Lagoon Nebula (M8) is the standout nebula during winter. Doesn't take much to get a decent shot of it.
I tried capturing the horsehead last night, but with an unmodded dSLR and a maximum exposure length of 30 seconds, all I managed was an incredibly noisy image where it's barely visible.
I also tried the rosette, which is what led me to create this the original post. Either I simply couldn't find it, or something about it makes it unsuitable for capture with my dSLR. It looks very bright in Stellarium, but even with ISO6400 and 30 sec exposures, I couldn't find it. Maybe I'm just retarded though ;-)
From that experience, I thought I'd ask here for good targets, because what I see in Stellarium doesn't seem to correlate with ease of capture. Some of what I've tried to capture, or have captured is:
* M42 - This is awesome, and easy
* Eta Carina nebula - Easy to find, hard to process for me
* Omega centauri - Easy to find
* Tarantula nebula - too dark for me to image currently
* Horsehead neb - again, too dark
* Beehive cluster - easy to find
* Southern pleiades - easy to find
* Jupiter - cool visually with its moons, but nothing but a spec to my ED80
I'd really love to get a decent image of a galaxy, but I'll need something pretty large to be able to get a decent image of it with the ED80 (Andromeda?)
