Hi All!
Long time lurker here. Decided to have a go at grabbing a photo of M31 a few nights ago with just a Canon 60D, a 70-200mm lens and a Tripod, taken from my garden! This is the first photo I've taken, and thought I'd share. Details for the acquisition are as below:
Canon 60D
Sigma 70-200mm lens, f/4
2200×1.3s exposures @135mm (most of these weren't great, 1300 made it into stacking)
120 Biases, 120 Darks, No Lights
Bortle 6 Skies, England
No tracking or other gizmos, just the camera lens and Tripod. Main issue was the image being out of focus, and too short exposure times (I did my exposure calculations for a 200mm shot, and then decided to go 135mm last minute…). So next time will use a bahtinov mask and slightly longer exposures, along with travelling to darker skies.
Hope this may encourage others to try if they don't have a tracker or fancy setup!
- Chris
by chrisk0010