The Milky Way by (almost) full moon (Brian Boyle)

The Milky Way by (almost) full moon

For the last 8 months, a piece of kit that w bought in a rush of blood to the head has been staring at me in an accusatory fashion as it sits unused on my desk .

It was a Sigma 40mm f1.4 lens, which I bought to do some wide field work. Unfortunately the camera I intended to use it with (2400MC) is occupied full-time on the ABC survey.

Yesterday, I could stand the guilt no more, and lashed together a rig with lens and camera, complete with a "sky hook" focusser, and set-up to do some test exposures of the Milky Way as it rose - albeit with 80% moon also in the sky.

For a first-light run, almost everything went wrong, the sky hook focusser didn't work [I had wrapped the dew strap too tight around the barrel], the ASIAIr would plate solve a 50 x 30 degree field of view and I ran the first half of the frames on a gain of zero (which didn't turn out too bad).

Despite all this, I did manage to get 3 x 1 hour exposures on each of three fields along the galactic plane; from the Eta Carina to the Eagle nebulae. I didn't quite get then all to line up - without a plate solve on the ASIAir., I was left to "stitch by eye using manual movements of my Skywatcher mount and had rotation of the camera.

However the final result surprised me - and really all thanks to the great post-processing software of GraXpert and the RC Astro tools. Clearly the Sigma lens is pretty extraordinary too - and the image certainly rewards inspecting at full resolution. What started as a test of a lash-up rig [see Version B] turned out OK. Who would have thunk it?

EDIT The full image doesn't display very well, so I have included a cropped version of the bulge region in Version C

Original
B
C
Final
F

C

Description: Cropped version - display better on AB

Uploaded: ...

F

Description: Re-processed with better coordinate projection and gradient removal

Uploaded: ...

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