I have not been able to post images to this site for a while as an “upgrade” completely screwed things up for me. Fortunately Dave Parker was able to unravel the damage caused by me upgrading one of the plug-ins and we should now be back in business.
Half a full Moon up last night and cloud rolled in fairly early on – but I managed to get some work done with the incredible Canon EF 200mm prime lens. I focused up on the Ruchbah region and then moved on to image Kemble’s Cascade. Not much colour in the stars as there was always the thin high cloud and the Moon to contend with. What did amaze me with this shot was the galaxy towards the top of the frame. That is IC342, an object I meant to image years ago, and I never realised that this is where it sat in the sky. These massive wide-field shots are also educational in seeing where things lie in the sky 🙂
Before taking the Kemble’s Cascade image, which was only 9 x 3-minute subs at ISO 500 under very non-ideal conditions, I set up focus on the Ruchbah region. This image is just a single 3-minute sub at ISO 500 – I am amazed at the low noise quality of the image from an uncooled camera!!
The Kemble’s Cascade image is not quite what I was looking for 🙁 The image I want for this region is a mini-WASP 4-framer, so I will just have to bite the bullet and get on with it at some point. The Ruchbah image on the other hand is quite amazing for such a short exposure time. The 200mm lens will allow me to capture the WHOLE of Cassiopeia in just 3 frames!! With such short exposures giving pretty reasonable results, this is a project that I should be able to complete in a single evening. Be sure to watch this space.