Ad Astra Observatory

I finally got through processing all the images from the first few nights of shooting. The workflow is very slow, and I am using unfamiliar tools, but it’s starting to come back. I am ready for the moon to stay out of the sky for a bit.

Without further ado, here is the last photo I shot on First Light night. This is about an hour of M57, a famous visual telescope object, but not really suited to my optics; it needs a lot more magnification to give it justice. But, I am getting a feel for how Trixie performs, and I look forward to besting this effort later.

A small technical detail, here; my 8mpx camera takes photos that are on the order of 3400×2400, and are quite large and take a long time to download. So I often resize the image (in one of several ways) before uploading it to the web. The above image is the full frame, just resized to 1500×1000. To get a more “zoomed” view of the object, here is a full-resolution crop of the original photo (1500×1000 but not resized).

It was a long, good night. I’m glad to be caught up on the post-processing, for now. Catching up on sleep is important, too, but that won’t be happening for a couple more days…