An imaging run in the Comana Woods with some astro-fiends. Good skies for this location, but some technical difficulties for my imaging gear. The hand-made dithering was rather poor for this session. Looking already for the next one 😉
Equipment: TS APO 115mm F/7 refractor, TS field-flattener, ASI 1600MM, no filter.
First targets: the Leo Trio of galaxies M-65, M-66 and NGC 3628. For this target I’ve hand-selected 350 frames from around 420, each a 20 second exposure at Gain 400 and Gamma 60. Again, the poor dithering almost ruined the shot completely…
And a colored version, with data from 2013.
And a few other less obvious objects found in the stretched image: four asteroids and the tidal tail of NGC 3628. A better view of this rather elusive detail will be my next session target 😉
And a short session with M 3 globular cluster. A lot of small galaxies visible also in the shot, despite being a very short total exposure (almost 7 minutes, in 40x10sec exposures).
Another view of globular cluster M3, this time from March 15, using the 355mm Newtonian under very poor conditions (mag +4 skies, humidity, some clouds). About 800 frames of 2 sec each, in poor seeing conditions.
maximus photography 