Hot on the heels of my “success” with M13, I decided to have a try at M3 and M5. I suffered the same problems with unusable subs for exactly the same reasons: it’s really pushing the mount too hard to expect the stock dual-axis motors and gearing to allow long exposures at a focal length of 1500mm. These two also suffer from a generous helping of noise thanks to needing to stretch the histogram so much. Again, longer exposures (and more of them) would almost certainly help.
I started with 60 exposures of 45 seconds for each image from the 450D, but dropped around half of them due to trailing. I’m not completely unhappy with them, but I’m not totally stunned either…
Oh, as well as M3 and M5 I also caught the ISS in one frame:
