As Orion Moves

I like to share both successes and failures.  This image was a bit of a failure.

I wrote about this some in the main astrophotography primer, here.  Deep space astrophotography can be tough.   If you think about it, we are on a spinning, wobbling ball, rotating around a larger spinning, wobbling ball, with other spinning-wobbly balls in a collection that spins around other spinning and wobbling things in a great dance, whose unheard tune is gravity.

It is really a wonder at all that we were able to observe, record and predict the motion of celestial bodies.

On the day of this outing, I couldn't get my laptop and telescope autoguider to play nicely together, limiting my exposure lengths to those that are tenable within the typical sidereal rotation tracking. 60 second exposures is about all you can get before stars start to trail, on my equipment without guiding.

As the winter comes to a close and our humidity increases, I will do less astrophotography from the backyard and more via remote observatory control, leaving the back yard / telescope for observing sessions over super gear-head astrophotography sessions.

Even though I was only able to get a 60 second exposure and I wasn't able to reliably collection Red, Green and Blue frames, it's always pretty awesome to pluck these images out of the sky.