April 14, 2008

9pm-12am

The sky was mostly clear for a good part of the night before finally clouding over completely.

M106

Another attempt.  Unfortunately, my tracking and alignment wasn't as good as it should have been, resulting in skewed stars.

This picture is a stack of 50, 21.2 second sub-exposures.  The galaxy's central disk stands out well, offering some detail of the star clouds swirling around the bright core. A dimmer halo of material surrounds the galaxy, just barely visible in this image. Longer and more sub-exposures should bring that detail out.

M109

I will not let the season pass without obtaining a good shot of this galaxy.  But if I am to do that, I will need considerably longer sub-exposures than I am using. 

While this stack of 80, 15-second sub-exposures shows the shape of the galaxy's spiral arms well enough, if fails to bring out any detail.  With M109 now reaching zenith just as the sky darkens at night, I won't have much longer to capture this galaxy unless I resort to moving the telescope out onto the front lawn, which is more effort than I'd like to put into getting the image.

M104 

Another galaxy that I really want to capture in detail before the season passes.  Yet, as with the others, I haven't yet applied long enough sub-exposures, or stacked nearly enough to reveal the fully amount of detail that the DSI Pro can capture.  

The poor tracking and alignment is quite visible here.