A small change in imaging targets…some deep-sky objects.
Since it’s been a while from my last deep-sky shots, I’ve decided that a short imaging session with more than one star would be a nice way to end the day (in the last few weeks I’ve only imaged one star: the Sun).
The equipment used for the following two shots was: 200mm F/5 Newtonian (homemade with SkyWatcher optics), Baader MPCC, UV/IR cut filter, ASI174MM.
The M 27 shot is a 100 frames stack, each a 10 seconds exposure. Total exposure just over 16 minutes.
The M13 shot is a 400 frames stack, each 5 seconds each. About 33 minutes total exposure.
No darks or flats were acquired, but some synthetic flats were manually created and subtracted from the final stacks. The guiding was the “default” one, with the EQ6 mount on normal sideral tracking.
The important conclusion coming from these results is that under suburban skies you don’t really need long exposures for brighter deep-sky objects if using planetary cameras. Just a lot of short-exposure frames. The sky conditions at my location were poor compared to dark sky areas: mag +4.5 at zenith, some humidity, and of course a lot o light pollution.
maximus photography 