M42 in under an hour!

[Smashtie]

Had a very brief spell of clearish skies on January 5th. Lots of high level haze, but I could see some stars for a change, so I rushed out and there was a gorgeous Orion hanging there just asking to have its portrait taken. So I thought I'd have my first go at a mosaic. Took two frames, one of M42, and the other of NGC1977, and tried to overlap. As usual for my low cost setup, no guiding, alt-az, so 10 second subs x 60 each frame. Then 20 flats, and by then the cloud had rolled in! There followed some significant delay while I tried to stack and mosaic. Eventually stacked in Astroart 5, and made the mosaic in Fitswork. I haven't yet tried to remove the background gradient across the mosaic, because I quite like the effect.

Turns out you can have quite a bit of fun with deep sky astrophotography and a Schmidt-Cas.

Cheers,

Rupert.

[Dave Wall]

Nice job Rupert.