Michael‘s Astrophoto Blog

Where I live the nights in June are super short, if it is fully getting dark at all. So this is a good time to look at some of the raw images collected earlier in the year before I was fully consumed by the Galaxy-Fever.  For various reasons I never fully processed these pictures. On some of the objects I wanted to take more raw frames and some were just tests for a bigger project. Well, none of that actually happened after Galaxy season started.  Looking at them now I think that they really didn’t deserve to be ignored that way. Some of them are actually quite nice and the objects deserve more attention in the future. 

The primary focus of the C9.25 at 2350mm in combination with the sensor size of my ASI 294 is giving a field of view that turned out to be a nice fit for imaging most of the spring galaxies.   However, there are a number of objects that do not quite fit. So I spent a few nights end of April to image a with the 1/6.3 reducer. This is giving a slightly larger field of view. More suitable for some of the larger objects. In addition to the larger galaxies I tried some groups of galaxies. Here it was a bit harder to get a good fit. HCG 44 may actually be better without the reducer. The famous Leo triplet is too big to fit within the FOV - so I captured only two of them. I think they are beautiful - even as a pair.  For the really huge galaxies - like e.g. the Andromeda galaxy - as well as the large scale galaxy groups even shorter focal lengths would be required. I still need to find a good solution for that. In the meantime I enjoy how these medium sized objects turned out.