Couch potato Astrophotography

[1DegreeN]

From my apartment on East coast my only view of the sky is a few degrees width of the eastern horizon up to about 30 degrees altitude, so astrophoto opportunities are usually pretty limited. But by some lucky coincidence the skies on Friday evening were clear to near the horizon and Orion was rising, so I thought I'd have a go. I took 118 short exposures totalling around 28 minutes and combined them all in PixInsight. Light pollution was heavy, as usual. I couldn't see M42 unaided and it took a few attempts to get it framed in the long lens. But the end result is not too bad, considering I didn't have to get up from the sofa to do it. I was using an Astronomik CLS clip filter for the first time, not sure how much that helped. Camera is a modified 700D, hence plenty of red in the picture. It's captured stars as faint as mag 13.8 which is better than I'd expected. I was using an Astrotrac to track. Polar alignment was very rough using a compass and the altitude scale on the wedge, stars were eggy at 30 seconds.

Orion nebula by js19pv, on Flickr

[ivan]

Nice work! Round looking stars despite using just a compass alignment. How I wish I had a good balcony view.

[PETER LOO]

Very impressive Orion neb, good work John, i can in fact see the running man neb, i can see that you are quite an innovative person, like Ivan (me ? no lah, retiring )

[rcj]

1DegreeN,

Sounds like a good effort you have made there. However, the image link does not seem to work anymore. Can't see even when logged in.

[1DegreeN]

I had replaced the original image on Flickr with a later attempt at post-processing to draw out more detail in the neb, however I did check that the image link in the original post was still working and showing the updated image. I've just edited the post and relinked to the Flickr image again - I hope that resolves the issue for you and you can see it OK now.

cheers
John

[rcj]

yes, certainly can see it now. looks nicely done. stars are tight and crisp. lots of detail within the nebula. good job!