The sky ended up very clear tonight and the temps were still in the mid-30’s so I made my first attempt at taking a widefield photo of the Andromeda galaxy. I set up my homemade barndoor tracker on my deck and tried to align the hinge line with Polaris, but my neighbor’s trees were blocking my line of sight so I had to take my best guess.
My Arduino Uno controlled homemade barn door tracker taking pictures of the night sky.
To the west I had a great view of the Cassiopeia and Andromeda constellations, but the light pollution was too much to make out M31. I tried aiming my camera about where it should be and then took a 30 sec exposure and sure enough, M31 showed up in the image. I made a few adjustments to get it a little close to center and then starting taking pictures.
I took a total of 50 pictures, with the tracker running to try and keep the camera aligned to the same spot. Because I wasn’t well aligned to Polaris, M31 slowly crept up my viewfinder during the couple of hours I was out there, but without the tracker I would have had to keep making adjustments to my camera mount.
I also took a bunch of pictures with the lens cap on and also with a few other ways. These are used by Deep Sky Stacker, a freeware app that takes all the pictures and compiles them into a single image. I still need to do some image processing, but here’s one of the 50 shots I took. If you click on the image it will open a large one and you can clearly see the Andromeda galaxy close to the center of the picture.
Andromeda Widefield (Canon T1i, EF-S 18-55mm at 48 mm, f/5.6, ISO 1600, 30 s exposure)
After getting enough shots, I decided to get a few quick shots of Cassiopeia as well. If you turn your head sideways to the right you’ll see the five stars that make a ‘W’ pattern. I must have bumped the focus off a little, but it’s still a pretty nice picture.
Cassiopeia (Canon T1i, EF-S 18-55mm at 48 mm, f/5.6, ISO 1600, 30 s exposure)
When I get a chance I’ll give a shot at doing some image processing with my stacked M31 pictures. I’d also like to get a telephoto lens at some point to be able to really zoom in on and take pictures of more galaxies, nebulas and other stuff.
A couple of months ago, when I decided to give astrophotography a try, I knew very little about either astronomy or photography. This is turning out to be a lot of fun.