The Pleiades again – DROGENBERG

Sleeping during a workweek is important! so this image was made unattended – counting on good luck. At the start of the session around midnight the sky was still covered with some high cirrus. At least the street lighting was already switched off.

Image data: Nikon 180mm tele F5.6, no filters, 82x180seconds or about 4 hours of data. It proves the interstellar nebulae are also visible from light-polluted area’s without the use of filters.

M45 Nikon 180mm ED D750 83x180s no filter SQM 2030 66% St-avg-14292.0s-WC_1_3.0_none-x_1.0_LZ3-NS-full-StSh-add-sc_BWMV_nor-AAD-RL-noMBB_1stLNC_it3-mod-lpc-cbg v3

I did not use any external filters, since these affect image quality. With 180 seconds and 800 ISO, the light pollution was substantial and flooded the image. So I used ISO400 instead, and also trimmed down the aperture to F 5.6

The Wide-field setup as used for this picture, the ‘day after’. Tracking was done with the Lacerta MGEN II on a 8×50 SkyWatcher finderscope. It also did the dithering and steerd the 82 frames of 3 minutes each. A standard electrical timer clock was used to cut the power after 5 hours, preventing the mount to ‘strangle’ itself

The light pollution reflected in three frames (also including cirrus passing by), the first setting F5.6 and ISO400 was used. I wanted to keep the 180seconds to re-use previous darks.

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