SGL7... ok I missed m51 but interesting fuzzes

[NickK]

So I admit.. I'm the worst astrophotographer in the world (call me Ed Wood) but I found some interesting fuzzies (for those uninterested.. I missed m51 by 31')

Now the fun of missing the target.. is finding where you actually hit - especially when it's mirror flipped! So this evening I found it by hand.

The first image is the really bad shot of the fuzzies and the second is the matching Aladin location with a Simbad filter showing the magnitude.

I think I broke my record of mag 16 (centre of pic left most of a line of two stars and the mag 16 galaxy)... at f12 (1370mm fl)! 1hr 40 minutes of 5 minute exposures...

[NickK]

Ok so I got very bored with all this cloud. Plus having spent time using PI for low light photography of roman remains etc has resulted in learning more..

This version has more selective alignment star selection (after checking the stars), no darks or flats, averaged sigma clipping. So - one scaled down, one at native resolution scaled up to 4x. Now although some is noise, after squinting and compensating for some alignment blur at the 4x I think the background noise is actually a star field..