The Pleiades

[Mystical Potato Head]

After weeks of cloudy nights i finally got out for a couple of hours on Saturday night so i chose an easy target for the new scope I had bought about 6 weeks ago (that put a curse on clear nights for a while.)

The Pleiades,M45 in the Messier List is the finest example of an open star cluster in the night sky.Also the blue nebula surrounding the stars probably makes it the most beautiful.
The brightest stars in the cluster are hot blue stars which formed within the last 100 million years or so.
This is 3x10 min exposures,Canon450d, manually guided using a William Optics Megrez 72mm apochromatic refractor atop a HEQ5 motorised mount.Images then stacked using Deep Sky Stacker.More than happy with this one,the focus is good and the tracking is also reasonably good.Colour could be bluer but didnt want to oversaturate it because its a relatively smooth image with not too much noise.
Very happy with new scope,half the diameter of the previous one i used for astrophotography so gives a wider field of view with less magnification so its a bit more forgiving if the tracking isnt exactly spot on.
Hopefully as i get used to it i might get one or two good shots when the winter celestial gems start to show themselves.
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo189/sat5_photos/M45megrez_filteredcroppedflickrsize.jpg

[dragonfly]

haven't a clue about half the things you've wrote but yes I agree its beautiful :Razz

[Kenn]

Looks like a squadron about to attack! Will look forward to seeing more pictures as they are very interesting.

[~~Tides~~]

Wow, (how much did it cost?).

[Mystical Potato Head]

Wow, (how much did it cost?).

A bargain at £300.The motorised mount is in the £400-600 range depending on
whether you want goto or not .goto means you type in a star name or whatever you want to find on a controller and the telescope automatically finds it for you.
Rather a lazy way imho and takes away the fun of"discovering" a faint galaxy or nebula by star hopping,might take a lot longer but it gives you a greater sence of achievment.
Mind you it helps those who dont know the night sky see things that they would never find themselves,Have seen me spend an hour or so looking for a faint galaxy and not finding it and i know the sky reasonably well.

[kas]

Nice one and look forwrd to see what else you take over the winter months.