M42 Orion Nebula

About 1,344 Light Years away, this beautiful Nebula can bee seen with the naked eye as a fuzzy blob.

Situated just below Orion's belt, it forms the central part of what is often known as the sword of Orion and its the closest massive place where stars are being born.
Its still a long long way away though as a light travels at 186,000 miles ever second so just multiply
by 31,557,600 seconds in a year by 1,344 years.
I'm pleased with this image as it was unguided and I could sit in my house (in the warm) and watch the images on my laptop coming from the camera outside in the freezing cold. I just popped out and moved the tripod every 20 shots.

Technical details are;
Canon 40D unmodified with 200mm lens @F/4 controlled by APT on a Manfrotto tripod .
The Raw images were stacked using 197 Lights, 30 Darks shot at 2 sec @1600iso and 20 bias @1/8000 sec. Mirror lockup and 5sec delay and 15 seconds between frames to allow the sensor to cool down.
Stacked in DSS and adjusted in PS.
I know these astro images are light years from the quality of most astro photographers but for me I learn so much more about astronomy by taking them.
So often I just looked through my telescope in awe but didn't really understand what I was looking at. Now I enjoy checking out what I have captured during those long cloudy nights.

Jupiters Great Red Spot

Finally I managed A reasonable image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
1200 images were stacked to reveal this giant storm which has been raging for at least 400 years. Two Earth's could fit inside the red spot, but with 270 mph winds its a violent place to be. A day on Jupiter lasts only 9 hours and 55 minutes so to get a picture of the spot I had to plan the time using the web. I live in a large town so light pollution can a problem until the early hours when the sky is darker.

M31 Andromeda and M110 untracked

This image was taken not with my telescope but with a Digital slr and a 200mm lens mounted on a tripod.

 Its made up of 347 light frames, 31 dark frames and 23 Bias frames.

Without going into too much detail, the dark and bias frames are taken with the camera lens cap on and are used to eliminate camera sensor noise and hot pixels.

With a shutter speed of 3.2 seconds @F4 it took some time as I used a remote release cable. Next time I will control the camera from inside the house with the hear on.

I processed the frames using Deep Sky Stacker( another free program) which took about 6 hours before adjusting noise and levels.

 

I was really pleased to see M110 (Andromeda's dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxy) for the first time as I cant see it with my eye through the telescope. You can see M110 below and to the right of Andromeda.

Checking the image against Stellarium I noticed M32 (a Dwarf Elliptical galaxy containing a supermassive black hole with a mass as big as 5 million Suns) another of Anromeda's satalite galaxies.

The image also shows the dust lanes which look like gaps in Andromeda's spiral arms.