It isn’t my best ever picture by a long shot, but at least it is a picture. The weather has been so attrocious that nothing has been possible. Short glimpses between clouds has been the best I could manage so far since about October. Anyway, managed to grab a few shots of Orions Great nebula, M42. Quite pleased given the difficulties on the night given that my mount decided not to autoguide properly. I used my Meade 8″ LX200R mounted in equatorial mode on my yard pillar in Kendal. The telescope had a f6.3 focal reducer attached to increase the field of view giving an effective focal length of 1260mm. I used my red-filter astro-modded Canon EOS400D at ISO1600. I took quite a few shots which I didn’t use for various reason  poor, trailed stars and cloud!  The final image is a composite of 227 seconds in total, comprising 1×120 seconds, 1×60 seconds, 1×20 seconds, 3×9 seconds subframes. These were overlaid in Photoshop to produce the final image – the shorter exposures allow the bright central portions of M42 to be not burnt out – they certainly were in the longest exposure.

Clearly, it needed more light but given the frustrating passage of clouds and the telescope issues, I’m quite pleased with the result. As Liz, my wife, said ‘You’d have been really pleased with that a few tears ago…’ To true but the better you do, the higher the standard you expect!