M45 - The Pleiades

COMMENTS
I went to Coe the night of August 12th to take some widefield and hope that some Perseids make into the FOV. But when I was done setting up my equipment, the Pleyades looked at me in a funny way, and I changed my plans,

However, since it was already very late and I was very tired, I didn't want to stay there until sunrise, so I ended up doing only 3 shots, 17 minutes each. Yeah, that would put the Canon to the limit but I really wanted to see how much data I could gather without breaking the camera :-), so I went to the longest single exposure I've ever done (17 minutes). With that, some canned darks (15 minutes darks though) and over 5hours processing, I've got this picture.

The image is rather noisy, but considering I had only a handful of frames, I think this is probably the best work I've done as far as applying the noise reduction - it's often hard to find the best point where the image isn't too noisy neither too blurry. Also, the nebulosity surrounding M45 wasn't that blue at first, and I admit pushing the level a bit too much to the blue side.

In any case, I am very happy with this image for several reasons. First, I conquered an amount of detail and depth I wasn't expecting - the data was there in the picture, but the processing was crucial here. Second, this was the first time I took single exposures over 15 minutes and the guiding came out pretty good - although of course this field has plenty of bright stars to use as guides :-) And third, the Pleyades was one of my very first astrophotography targets back in December 2007, and it was very nice to compare the old version with the new one.

In any case, here's an object that I will most definitely revisit later on, but with more shots, exposure, and definitely more coffee :-)