The long cold nights are here again, and winter (!) is being signalled by Orion the hunter rising in the East in the late evening. I was out at the weekend playing with my new toy – a ‘GOTO’ motor upgrade for my scope. This was purchased after making a botched attempt at a modification to the handset for my telescope motors. It should let me computer guide the scope for longer exposure photography (yet to try) but a major bonus is that I can key in any catalogued deep space object and the GOTO upgrade will whizz the scope around to point at that object.
So – first test, the M33 Triangulum Galaxy – a face on spiral galaxy in the Triangulum Galaxy. I don’t know how many times I tried and failed to find this last year – it’s just too faint and dispersed to pick up easily in the eyepiece. But, with the GOTO up and running, I can just key in ‘M33’, attach the camera, and away we go! Once again, the long exposure photograph picks up much more than can be seen visually. It’s taken ages to get this image the way I want it – it doesn’t reveal as much as it could do, but if I bring out any more detail the sky gets too grey. I like the speckly, fluffy, cotton wool effect of this galaxy. This is approx 1 hour of total exposure time, from 24 separate 150 second exposures.
