I recently did a midnight-'til-dawn astrononomy expedition to my solitary coastal heathland spot and saw all of those lovely summer delights at the milky way centre slowly rising in the south-east. So, I thought I would put a bit of effort into manual off-axis guiding. This involves me bent over looking at an extremely faint guide star and trying to keep it on the red crosshairs using a N/S/E/W hand pad. After the 30 second pictures started trailing because the automatic tracking was slowing, I got a 3 min 45 second picture of the Eagle Nebula, M16. I also took some 30 second darks, flats, flat darks, a 4 min dark, which roughly offset the internal camera 'glow' from the Eagle Nebula picture. After applying all the flat corrections I found my image much noisier than the raw image minus the dark. So here it is: a single exposure at f/6.3 f=1260mm 1600ISO (my manual guiding skills are great). I have used the vignetting (central brightness) to my advantage during the processing. The 'Pillars of Creation' are in the middle of the red nebula just to the right of the open cluster. An improvement on last year's multiple 30" exposures, and a surprising amount of red!
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