First crack at Andromeda, 50mm

[cstew]

First time even looking at it let alone imaging it! Dragged the scope out for a quick sesh seen as it was nice and clear (and cold) spent quite some time polar aligning the mount, my back yard isn't the best place for astronomy to be honest! But got it done, then spent another eternity hunting down Andromeda, again, mostly due to lack of space, inconsiderate peoples houses in the way etc. etc. But was then pleased to see the distinctive fuzzy in the eyepiece. Then I decided to have a go at imaging it, simple setup, 1100D, tripod, 50mm f/1.8 lens. Spent a while trying out different settings and trying to get decent focus, ended up at f/2.2, 6s and iso 1600, which looks like this after some basic processing and cropping.

Quick, yes, dirty yes, room for improvement, definitely. But still quite happy to get anything astronomical imaged. Especially before I got hypothermia. Insane to think that you are looking 2.5 million years into the past, at something 15000000000000000000 miles away, I'd like to see Han make that trip in less than 12 parsecs.......

[stargazer1960]

Cracking shot it is amazing what we can see up there what scope have you got ? Also how did you take the image, did you use an adapter for the camera ?

[Quatermass]

This is a great subject you can keep coming back to it again and again and never grow tired of imaging it ;-)

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[cstew]

Cracking shot it is amazing what we can see up there what scope have you got ? Also how did you take the image, did you use an adapter for the camera ?

The image was taken just using the camera and lens, I have the necessary adapters to attach it to my scope, but with a non tracking mount, it's difficult to get the exposure times. I have a skywatcher 130 scope.

[kirkster501]

Well done.  A good start.

[andyo]

good shot certainly cant be easy without a mount that tracks

[cstew]

Just had another look through the images I took, I had noticed another faint fuzzy in a couple of images, but wasn't sure, a quick search has lead me to believe it may be the Triangulum? Here is it's position relative to Andromeda in the wide image, the bottom left hand corner highlighted, also something streaky, highlighted centre. Also a crop of both highlighted areas:

Comparing it to a similar image I found on google, looks like it is the Triangulum, 2 galaxies in one, not bad!