First Astrophoto Attempt

The plan for tonight was to experiment with taking deep sky photos with my camera mounted piggyback on the Celestron and to learn how to use stacking software to process the images. I decided that the Andromeda galaxy would be a good choice.

The sky was clear at 5:00 PM  and temps were fairly warm. I decided to set up the telescope and planned a short period of observation while I waited for Andromeda to rise a bit. At 7:00 PM, the clouds came in and lingered off and on. But there were breaks and I was able to observe a couple of globular clusters (M15 and M2) and an open cluster, M29.

At about 10:30 PM I decided to get the Canon 50D attached to the scope to try to photograph the Andromeda Galaxy. By then, the scope was covered in dew, but I didn't need the scope's optics as I was only interested in the guiding of the camera. I took 10 images, each 30 seconds in duration (270mm, f6.3) for a 5 minute exposure. I then processed the images using DeepSkyStacker (DSS) a freeware image stacking software package. The results, although not great, is shown in the image below.

The detail is not as good as I would have liked, but this was a quick and dirty session just to see how the camera, lens, mount and DSS worked. The halo of light in the image is of some concern - I'm not sure how, or why, that happened. At a minimum, I need to increase the individual exposure times and then take more images. I didn't apply dark frames or anything else (for those interested in what dark frames are, I point you to the DSS site). Much more to come as I learn and experiment more in the near future.