Last day of August, can't help but feel the change of seasons in the air as we transition from summer to fall. With the change in seasons we also shift from prime Milky Way season with the core visible to winter season where we can no longer see the core of our galaxy. Here in the northern hemisphere it also means longer and colder nights and I have to think about other things to image and work on. This time of year we also start seeing the Orion constellation rise earlier and earlier, my main goal this fall and winter will be putting together a series of images of the constellation at various focal lengths. Here's a shot of the Orion and Running Man Nebula from last year, this will be my benchmark to improve on.
Decided to do a bit better edit of this, added some flats into the calibration and did my normal PixInsight workflow with a stronger star size reduction in Photoshop afterwards.
Quick and dirty edit of my imaging from over the weekend, two panels mosaiced, each panel shot with a Nikon D600 and Samyang 135mm f2 lens on a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer mount guided with an Orion 50mm mini guide scope and a Toupcam guidecam. The left half of the image was 60 exposures, 2 minutes each at f2 and ISO 800, the right half was 40 exposures with the same settings, had to toss out 20 exposures from the right panel because of a focus problem. With the lousy weather I probably won't be able to get the upper 2 panels complete until the next new moon phase in a couple weeks.
