Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula and a Galaxy Group – Clear Sky 2

The Evening

The second evening with my new little APO. Another evening of trying a lot of things. I wanted to see some of the objects i saw on the Facebook Astro-Groups every day.

Andromeda Galaxy, M31

I started with 20 photos at ISO 1600 with 120 seconds exposure time – unguided (!) – at the Andromeda Galaxy M31. The single exposure were unguided. Some of them were really nice:

I did the stacking with DSS using BIASES and DARKS and stretched the result with GIMP. Not all of the frames had those awesome round stars as you can see in the result:

Orion Nebula, M42

The seconds object was the Orion Nebula again. I did 50 exposures, each 60 seconds at ISO 800. I used 45 of them in DSS using BIASES and DARKS. Stretched a bit in GIMP and saved it as jpg. Now, in December, i did some more curve modification in Affinity and saved it for this blog article:

Group of galaxies: M105, NGC 3384, NGC 3389, M96

The third object, i was really impatient, was a group of galaxies with M105. I did 30 exposures with 60s each at ISO 800. Here the stacked image. (Stacked in December 2021 with Affinity using DARKS and BIASES and also some FLATS from 2 weeks later). I simply had no result with enough pixels.

Lessons Learned

This evening i used my unmodded CANON EOS M100. The mount control was still used with APT. To control the M100 i used the iOS App “CC & C” which works perfect.

What i really hated for several month was the fact that i did not really found the objects in the sky with my goto mount. I always had to use the arrow keys of the mount control to find the object. It took me several month to fix that later.

Focusing with a Bahtinov-Mask worked really well.