Category: Astrophotography

Above is a picture of the edge on spiral galaxy known as NGC 891 in Andromeda, discovered by William Herschel perhaps the greatest astronomer ever. I took this Sunday evening at the River Ridge Observatory with my 11″ SCT on a CGEM DX mount and my Canon EOS T5. This is a composite of six 60 second images and my paltry Photoshop skills. I framed the shot to get the other little edge on spiral on the left. I don’t know it’s designation yet. There is also a a fuzzy above it about a third the way from the top.

Below my friend Don Walters imported the picture into PixInsight and ran a script to identify several galaxies. I had spotted three counting the big one, he found eight more. Looks like a star chart with those lines and designations.

On what might be the final clear night of the year, I set up my C11 (Elf) and used my Canon EOS t5 to take this picture. I used BackyardEOS to control the camera. This is 21 30 second images combined. I haven’t done deepsky other than with the stock lens of my camera in a long time and I’ve forgotten the techniques I once knew. The seeing Friday was not as bad as predicted but not great and focus was hard to come by. Once I worked through the details of acquisition, I got my images. After acquisition I remembered my focal reducer/corrector which would have helped, this is prime focus at f/10. Saturday morning I auto aligned in Photoshop and switched back to Lightroom for processing. Click image for a larger view.