Starting Galaxy Season

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I am a big fan of galaxies. During spring, when a large of them are visible, I used to spend many nights watching them. Most of them are just fuzzy patches, but if you try a little you can see a bit of structure in some of them. If that doesn’t work it is still fun to see if any small companion galaxies are visible and to check their magnitude on a star map.

So I was really looking forward to my first galaxy season as a photographer. Some of the reason why I directly tried to make astrophotography work with my SCT, rather than using smaller focal lengths initially, had to do with my hopes of being able to photograph galaxies. 

Fortunately there were a couple of clear nights beginning of March and I went a bit crazy imaging all the objects from my usual observing list.   I started with relatively small numbers of frames per object, in order to get some first overview of all the items on my list, what is possible and which objects are good. That way I took pictures of 40+ galaxies in jaust a couple of nights. 

The results can be seen below. Clearly most objects would benefit from an increased exposure time and in some cases I could improve the image processing. However, the images are already showing what I was looking for in this first attempt: The incredible variety and beauty of these objects.































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