Lunchtime Photo

Saturday was astronomy night, so I headed out to the desert to take a picture of the Heart Nebula. I've done this already, but my telescope has too long a focal length (900 mm) to capture the whole thing. All I got was a part of the nebula and you couldn't really tell that it was heart-shaped.

So this time I did a mosaic: four separate images that get stitched together in post-processing. It was a lovely night, but unfortunately not everything went well: it seemed as if the telescope wasn't moving in order to capture the four images. It took me a while to confirm this, and eventually I discovered there was a hidden setting called "Slew to target." But why is this a setting? If you've specifically set things up to take four separate frames, why would you not want to slew to each of them? I still have no idea.

In any case, I fixed that but by then I only had a few hours of darkness left. That meant I got only about 40 minutes per frame, and even on a good night that's not enough to get a really detailed image.

Still, as you can see, it worked. The image is decent, the slewing and stitching worked great, and it's a clear proof of concept that I can do this. I even adjusted the rotation of the camera so that the heart was right side up. At least with this one you can tell where it got its name.