M81/82: Galaxy hunting with telephoto lens

[wolfgang.f]

A standard 55-200mm Tamron telephoto lens may hardly seem like the right tool for hunting galaxies. However, I felt like experimenting and pointed the camera (EOS 550D on a Celestron AS-GT mount) towards Messier 81/82.

I shot a series of 25 subs with 3min exposure at ISO 1600, ran them through Deep Sky Stacker and was quite surprised at the result: M 81 and 82 showed up in the picture like I had hoped, but there but also the two fainter galaxies NGC 3077 and NGC 2976 (brightness around mag 10).

The limits of a telephoto lens were also rather apparent: All the brighter stars had a purple fringe around them, so I ended up converting the picture into black and white. Now, let's try this with a real telescope next time... ;-)

But there's one thing that never ceases to amaze me: The light that fell on my camera chip last night started its journey from M81 around 11.8 million years ago...

Wolfgang

[bamus]

nice one Wolfgang! To reduce purple fringe you should step down your lens to f 6 or even 7. This is doing good job with my Tamron 70-300.

But before I have learned that I have taken similar shot also in B&W:

[Tadakun]

awesome!!! i wish i wasnt confined to 2sec exposures!

[russ]

That's a great image, really like that. It was the sort of thing i had in mind before selling my imaging setup. Would have been very happy with that result.

[stevedodkins]

I really like seeing these widefield images of galaxies, great image.

Steve