M42 20/01/09

[Milliways]

Alignment slightly better 2 X 1min exposure. ISO 1600 & ISO 3200

[MartinB]

Nicely on track Milli, just needs more exposure time now to turn this into something special

[Milliways]

Cheers mate My scope is really weird.. i can take a 2 mins exposure cristal clear and then a 30sec exposure blurry as hell lol.

[MartinB]

That's not weird Mil, that's a worm gear in operation, either that or wind. The worm gear in your mount probably has something like a 7 minute cycle. All mounts are faster at some points in the worm cycle than others. In fact the speed against time graph follows a sinusoidal curve. If you are imaging at the top or bottom of the curve the tracking will be good but if you image when it is at the steepes point you get trails. Mounts also generate random tracking errors as well and they can really mess things up!

[Talitha]

Wonderful capture of the 'Eagle' portion swooping in from the left.. thank you!

[Milliways]

This was a 1min 51sec single exposure, terrible star streaks at the cost of more detail. Now would it work if i took 120 X 30sec images? would that give me the same amount of detail as the 60 X 1 min exposures?