Milky Way and Andromeda, Italy

[Sam Bo]

Hi all

First attempts at widefield photography with my new Nikon D5100 and no mount. Single frames taken near Taranto in Southern Italy. First two show part of the milky way (perhaps someone with more knowledge knows the region?), and last one shows the Andromeda Galaxy if you zoom in. Have aways loved looking up and seeing the smudge so was chuffed to capture it first time. Looking forward to spending some time working on capturing photons from Andromeda. Next step is piggybacking to my reflector for manual tracking and stacking longer exposures.

NEF files 20 second exposure, F3.5, kit zoom lens at 18mm, ISO 800 with NR on. Reprocessed and converted to JPEG with software in the camera.

Cheers

Sam

[JamesF]

The bright stars at the bottom right of the first image are the end of Scorpio, and then above it to the left is Sagittarius (slightly below centre of the image). I think you've picked up M7 there, with the Lagoon nebula above it and one or two others as well.

James

[sologuitarist61]

I'm rerally surpised that Andromeda shows up that well with a camera lens - very good images

[Sam Bo]

Thanks for your comments

Sam