well not so much with the fireworks

Monday August 13th 2007 09:58 AM PST

So even at the max point of the Perseus shower last night, it was really not too spectacular. I really only saw a couple bright paths, and I only caught one in an exposure. The top one... yup, i know... really lame.

BUT, the pleiades were really clear with Mars just below them. AND the more shots I took the more I realized I was starting to get good Messier blur on a couple points of light. So i started looking at star charts and found the blurs were exactly where they should be. I was getting great pictures of M31. And its kinda obvious, M31 is Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our Milky Way. So its a nice big blur in the sky that you can't miss when you're pulling a long exposure.

So i think the camera and the hand controlled telescope have to go. Its time i stepped things up and got a computer controlled system. I don't expect to get pictures of M31 like this, but it will sure be better than a tiny blur spec in a wide angle picture.

Comments:

What kind of camera are you using? The pics look great!

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I was using a Nikon D50. Most of the shots I was using f5.6 with a 30 second exposure. I did a couple with a f3.5 with a 5 second exposure, but the 5 seconds was not enough time to catch anything flying by. The really important thing was to set the camera to capture images in the RAW file format. If you let the camera JPG compress the images, they end up actually blowing out a lot of the tiny stars that are really faint.

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