I've been shooting the sky every Friday night, regardless of how good or bad the sky's been, with the following results:
Sagittarius and Scorpius, much dimmer than in Bintan (naturally)
But. I realised that that problem is the impossibility of balancing the signal to noise of such a large picture.
So I tried zooming in. Note the tail of Scorpius near the centre bottom of the picture. I'm going to zoom in now.
You see the faint patch in the centre top of the picture with a few dim stars in it? That's M7, an open star cluster. The blurriness is due to stars that aren't resolving right. What I didn't expect to catch is the fainter blur above and to the right. That's M6, or the Butterfly cluster.
You want to see some terrible light balance? Take a look at this:
Summer triangle. Urgh. Now look at the really bright star up near the top. That's Vega, which has served as a benchmark against which all stars are calibrated in brightness for a very, very long time. I'm going to zoom in.
Ok. Not the best. The image was too far to the edge, resulting in some severe lens aberration. But you can see the faint parallelogram next to it. That's Lyra., the constellation Vega is in. I was hoping to catch M57, or the Ring Nebula, in the shot; it's between the two stars on the right. It's also not visible.
But what did surprise me is the blur directly below Vega. That's not a circular dot. It's Epsilon Lyra, which is a binary star. And this camera caught it.
I'm happy.
Of course, no night would be complete without at least one long exposure shot:
Make that two:
The bright star? Venus. The faint star on its right? Saturn. The blur rolling on the floor? My student, with a handphone starmap.
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