M81 Bode's Nebula And M82 Cigar Galaxy (187 X 20s @ ISO400)

Date: 5 January 2013

Equipment: Skywatcher Explorer 150P, EQ3-2 with dual-axis motor drive, Skywatcher 0.9x Coma Corrector, Canon EOS 1100D

Exposure: 187 x 20s @ ISO400 with relevant dark, bias and flat frames

Processing: Exposures captured with Astrophotography Tool, raw files (cr2) stacked with Deep Sky Stacker Beta, curves adjusted, background removed and noise filter applied with Fitswork.

Location: London, England

The fifth in my short exposure experiment. I had trouble finding the target so developed a new method for finding DSOs. I simply point the telescope roughly at where I think the DSO lies, then I take a very short exposure, 5s @ ISO6400, and upload the jpeg to Astrometry.net. This tells me where the telescope is pointing and I can make approximate corrections with the motor handset. The process is repeated until the DSO comes into the field of view. Now I can find faint DSOs within 10-15mins all from the warmth of the indoors thanks to two 10m RJ11 extensions cords and a 10m USB repeater cable I acquired cheaply.