This is the result of my first attempt at deep-sky photography. It shows the area around Cygnus (the bright star in the centre is Deneb) and a small portion of the Milky Way.
The photograph consists of five 2 minute exposures (and 3 dark frames) taken with a Canon 350D and the ‘kit’ 18-55 lens piggy-backed on an LXD75 mount. The images have been combined using Iris, a freeware image processing program.
The clouds finally cleared on Saturday evening for long enough to finally get some pictures of the outer planes, Uranus and Neptune. These pictures are really only for completeness. While these planets are gas giants, they’re so far away that they appear tiny through the telescope. The distances in the outer Solar system are truely staggering, Uranus is 19AU away (an AU is the distance form the Earth to the Sun, 93 million miles) or 1.6 billion miles; Neptune, 29AU or 2.7 billion miles. Put another way, the light that the telescope is collecting from Neptune has travelled for 8 hours since leaving the Sun.
Uranus Neptune
Both images were taken using the modified webcam on the Club’s Celestron 9.25 at f/10.
