The Core of Our Galaxy
This was supposed to be the start of my Ridiculously Huge and Way Too Much Work(TM) summer Milky Way project. Instead I get to start all over thanks to some stupid lens/camera artifact that showed up in all the images I took this last weekend. When finished the picture will be roughly 8 times bigger than this and will require around 10-12.5 hours of exposures. This is about the best I could edit out of the 2.5 hours of exposures I took Saturday night.
This is 3 of the 5 panels for the mosaic I shot that night, each panel is a stack of 15 exposures taken with my Nikon D800E and Samyang 135mm lens on a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracking mount. Each exposure is 2 minutes at ISO 800 and f2. Also did 38 flat frames and 15 dark frames for calibration, done in PixInsight before exporting and stitching with PTGui followed by more editing in Photoshop.
