An Excellent Clear Night - how many galaxies can YOU count?

[Stub Mandrel]

Last night I was walking the dogs, just after sunset. When I left Jupiter was visible, over 25-30 minutes first Sirius, then all the 'winter hexagon' appeared until I could even see two stars in Orion's belt in a sky that was still coloured blue. As things improved I had to set up my gear. I decided just to use my 450D with a 300mm lens, unfortunately although I put loads of care into polar alignment and focusing, I left too great a counterweight on the balance arm of my mount, so I ended up losing about 2/3 of my subs. Usually most of my subs are OK when I use a light setup.

But - for my relatively light-polluted location, the sky was incredibly clear, and that meant not only were my subs unusually sharp (I could see detail in galaxies in the raw images) but even after stretching the LP gradients I had to remove were minimal.

I ended up tackling four targets, ignoring Jupiter and spending a lot longer than I expected. Here are the results in order, all processed much less than my usual efforts.

Leo Triplet

Some of the Virgo Cluster. Chuffed with the face on galaxy at right, of the ones on the Astrometry index, I can see a good 34 galaxies although a few elude me!

 

Praesepe - unfortunately tree stopped me getting many subs, only seven in this! Still, a few tiny galaxies.

Sombero Galaxy - worth revisiting with my big scope. There one more galaxy in this image, can you find it?

All in all, I'm astounded to get these pictures without using a telescope, but it just makes me want a 130P-DS even more!

[mapstar]

Wonderful images Neil 

[Floater]

Excellent! Cracking images and very interesting presentation, Neil.

Thanks.

[andyo]

nice shots, good widefield of the leo triplet

[Davey-T]

Excellent images Neil, sky was the best it's been here for a while last night, pity they forecast wall to wall cloud or I might have been ready for some imaging, only discovered it when I looked out about 11.30.

I could clearly see all 5 stars in Cassiopeia , so what you may say, but it's usually lost in an orange SE London fog.

Dave

 

[Paul73]

I am a sucker for wide field Galaxy shots and was happily counting galaxies when I noticed the "not bad without a telescope" comment.

I'm amazed. 

What were you tracking with?

Paul

[abhoriel]

Wow, awesome without a telescope.  what exposure times did you use? What f stop was the lens at?

[Stub Mandrel]

A very old PrinzGalaxy 400mm and home-made stepper drive for my EQ3-2 mount (on EQ5 tripod).

I'm making a full goto drive, which will include a guider port and then the sky's the limit!

Lens was wide open at f6.3. For the triplet out of ~45 exposures 19 were sharp enough to use (I didn't balance the mount properly), all 110 secs at ISO 1600, except the beehive at 60 seconds - but still burned out most of the star colour.

[Stub Mandrel]

Noticed the Sombrero Galaxy shot was very gray in comparison to the others. Just added another histogram stretch:

[laudropb]

Lovely set of images.

[Paul M]

Excellent work,

I really enjoy wide angle galaxy cluster images.

Mesmerising!

[StargeezerTim]

Great images... As you say, it's wonderful what you can image with an off the shelf camera and lens.

[Stub Mandrel]

My thanks for the positive comments.

My next try at the Virgo Cluster will be one frame lower!

I will try another round of processing - it seems I have picked up plenty of blue colour in the arms of M65 and M100. These will be good targets for the scope.