M45 Pleiades - Seven Sisters

[JR]

It was actually very clear for about an hour last night, and I went for quick and simple as better than the long run of absolutely nothing doing. Using a dslr and static tripod, I took 60 1.3 second iso 1600 shots of the Pleiades and environs in quick succession.

The camera was a Sony α3000 with an OM1 75-150 lens set to widest angle. The camera takes a dark immediately after each exposure and subtracts.

Camera shake spoiled some shots despite using shutter delay and were not used. The final image is a DSS stack of 43 frames with three Photoshop levels stretches.

James

[tcos...@gmail.com]

That's a nice image James and great that you did some imaging in the clear spell last night. The Pleiades are well placed at the moment and make a good target for observing and imaging. I also got out last night and took some images of M42 in Orion which is rising nicely in the south eastern sky during the first half of the night. An added bonus for deep sky imagers is that the Moon is out of the way at the moment and there are lots of nice objects around, if only the clouds would keep away!
Tim C

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[William Bottaci]

Hello James, a good example of taking the opportunity, as you say,
when anything more sophisticated wouldn’t have the time, and it's not
just the exposures but the setting up - and down again.
That’s quite a few stars for 1.3 seconds, more than we'd normally see
by eye, and akin to a binocular view, but then a telephoto is a
monocular of sorts. Even better considering it's not near the Milky
Way.

My Canon camera, a 2013 model, has the same feature on darks, found in
the menu: 'Long exposure noise reduction'. The shutter closes but the
camera is still taking the exposure - seems a bit weird until you get
used to it. Anyone looking to take similar images would do well to see
if their camera also has this feature...

An advantage of this method is that you save on disk space by not
having separate files.

Thanks for sharing, always good to see the Pleiades.
William

On Sun, 13 Dec 2020 at 20:46, <tcos...@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a nice image James and great that you did some imaging in the
clear spell last night. The Pleiades are well placed at the moment and
make a good target for observing and imaging. I also got out last
night and took some images of M42 in Orion which is rising nicely in
the south eastern sky during the first half of the night. An added
bonus for deep sky imagers is that the Moon is out of the way at the
moment and there are lots of nice objects around, if only the clouds
would keep away!
Tim C

[Trev S]

Nice image James, it shows a lot of the stars in the pleaides cluster (around 200 I believe)