Blogs at RogerGroom.com

We had a nice clear night here in Perth last night, with the temperature getting down to a nice 6 degrees. This made for fairly good imaging conditions.

Before leaving my scope going for the night on NGC objects I let it run through 20 exposures of Centaurus A. To my surprise I don't think I have ever taken a serious shot at this galaxy before! Just shows how many there are to photograph that I have't after 8 years!

I'm quite happy with the result on this,NGC5128, it's relatively sharp and shows quite a bit of detail through the "meat" in the hamburger. See it here:

I have a new galaxy image up: M104. It's actually the first time I've given a galaxy (other than the LMC/SMC/Milky Way) any reasonable length of exposure with my Canon 350D. It often surprises me what results these un-modified DSLR's can achieve on galaxies, being too easy to get hung up on the bad results they often give on nebulas.

It was also the first night out with my new Megrez 90 and Field Flattener v3 under dark skies. The Megrez performs quite well, but the Field Flattener is proving a litle troublesom, not correcting the field as much as I would like. On this particular night I got to the point where I just gave up with fiddling and started taking photo's, this being one.

I believe the troubes with the Field Flattener can be solved by correcting the spacing between Flattener optics and the chip in the camera. Something I will have to invest some reasonable time in working out/adjusting.

Processing these shots is taking ages. I have some from the same night of Omege Centauri, M5, M83 and NGC 6121, but it's taking a long time to get them processed!

Here's a link to M104: http://www.rogergroom.com/items/m104_galaxy_200903

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