Messier Marathon, take one
A beautiful night at the Astro Shed. The plan? Image as many of the Messier objects as I can.
Using a copy of the MessierMarathon.js which I got from Richard Wright’s blog, A New Messier Marathon Scripting Example, I set on my way. I don’t have the limits right for my scope yet, so I did in fact get a couple of really nice shots of the walls (sorry, I deleted those). When I give this a second take I will definitely add a focus run every so often - the temperature drop over the night caused quite a bit of drift in the later images.
After all was said and done I managed to get 87 out of the 110 Messier catalog objects. Many were competing with moonglow. Each image is a 300 second monochrome image, all luminance, and each were calibrated with a master dark, superbias, and 30 flats. I did very little postprocessing. I could have skipped a few, because in many instances there are more than one object in the same field of view. These were all taken with my Takahashi FSQ-106edx-v4, an Atik 16200 mono camera, and a Paramount MyT.
Here is a full shot of the gallery. If you want to see each of the individual images and their blurry goodness, scroll down to the bottom of the post.
Click through the pictures to see what I captured. Way too many of them are out of focus.
