Observatory Last night

A good turn out last night at the Observatory. After the very informative astrophotography workshop it was surprisingly clear with a few passing clouds on a strong westerly wind, very mild for the time of year too, with it being 8C in the dome at around midnight. Saturn was quite a good sight despite it being only approx 10 degrees above the gibbous Moon. Mars was viewed with a small amount of surface detail visible in higher magnification. After everyone apart from Brian and myself had departed home I attached my Canon onto the 80ED. As the scope was aimed on the Moon I took a few of shots. This was the best.

Canon EOS 350D 1/125. ISO 100. Processed in photoshop.

I then took 15 images at 30s and 15 x 20s of the Pleiades (M45) of which none were usable. M45 was actually getting quite low in the sky. They looked OK on the LCD screen on the camera but once on a PC they were most disappointing. There were too many passing clouds and all my pictures suffered from too much light pollution. (I should have took my light pollution filter with me, D'oh). By about 0030, patchy cloud was building all the time from the west and I went for M37 in Auriga.

I managed to get 5 frames that were usable.
80ED refractor. 5 x 20S, ISO 1600. Stacked in MaxDSLR and then processed in photoshop. Not brilliant but a start. Just before we quit for the evening we slewed round to M51 the whirlpool galaxy.... I tried a couple of 20S exposures....Nothing. Way too much light pollution.... Too many clouds. With that we packed up at about 0100 and left the observatory in the command of the Rabbits and Cougars!