Wide Field shot of Orion 12/29/02
I was using the Orion Tabletop Equatorial Mount with drive motor. I had puchased this for using my camera and this was the first time I've been able to play with it. Cincinnati is not known for the best astro viewing.
The following image is a 2 image stack of 2 exposures of 3 minutes each. I had zoomed my 35-350mm to full wide angle for this. Fstop should have been 3.5. My polar alignment probably was terrible as I could just barely make out Polaris thru the haze. I also have bright lights all around for lots of light polution. Basically, I pointed the thing North by pure guess and set the angle for my local latitude (39 degrees). I thought I could see Polaris in the center of my D60 view finder but it was a very rough guess.
I did take 3 dark frames which I averaged and subtracted from the images prior to stacking them. The result has been resized.
This is my first real attempt at anything at this point. Below this, I'll put a crop of the M42 region so you can see the actual pixels I managed to catch and the tracking errors too.
Now for the crop from the M42 region:
How'd I do????