A Crop of Galaxies

[Stub Mandrel]

Despite turning up at my 'darkish-site' without my mount and a 12 mile round trip to fetch it, I got three hours of cloud free(ish) imaging last night. The rare opportunity to see the whole of the Plough and it's galaxies set me on the path of some quick Messier galaxy bagging. I have wanted a passable M101 for ages, M51 is just to nice to miss out and I haven't done M81/82 before. Whilst waiting for m32 to rise above the trees I took a dozen widefield shots of the great rift, but cloud was starting to appear and as the LP filter doesn't fit my wide angle lens + 0.45 converter I'm battling with getting the colour anything but ghastly. In fact the colour of all these is still a bit off.

Strangely the corner of the sky with M31 in stayed cloud free for ages so i got about 22 subs, but then the cloud got in properly, I had a quick shot at M33 but must have knocked teh focus when framing it because all my stars are doughnuts... I think I'm destined never to image M33!

While waiting for the images to come I either stared at the sky - better than home but only somewhere between Bortle 5 and 6 with big light dome from Brum and another from Utoxeter- the latter stopped me getting really good results despite being 10km away! I need to go further afield. Was chuffed to see M31 really clearly through my tiny 20mm finderscope! Not convinced I could see it with the naked eye.

So all of these are a bit short on subs, ~30 minutes on the small galaxies and 22 on M31.

 

 

 

 

[StargeezerTim]

A very nice group of galaxies here. Well done!