Quite a few “firsts” this week. Makes such a change to have so many nights of clear sky. This night the sky clarity wasn’t great, but I wanted to try a widefield shot and wasn’t too worried about the outcome as long as I got a feel for what was required. I mounted up my unmodified 450D DSLR directly on the EQ3-2 and pointed it towards the constellation of Cygnus. I set up the remote shutter control on the camera to take thirty exposures of 45 seconds each with the kit 18-55mm lens at 18mm and opened as wide as possible at f/4.5.
The thirty exposures together with ten darks were fed into Deep Sky Stacker and I did no further processing. Here’s the result:
I’m not particularly happy with the outcome on this one. I have nicely captured Cygnus, Lyra, Sagitta and Delphinus, but the image really lacks dynamic range. I think the seeing was perhaps actually worse than I realised and that thin high cloud spoilt the image.