The Pleiades

I imaged the Pleiades about a month ago. I used my 300mm lens. After getting some time on the Dumbbell Nebula, I took off the teleconverter and shot this target again with a longer focal length than I had before. I also used ISO 3200 and f/5.6 to bring out those diffraction spikes, which I think look really cool.

 

Equipment:

Celestron CGEM Mount

Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s at f/5.6

Sony a7RIII (unmodified)

Altair 60mm Guide scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3

35 x 90" for 53 min and 5 sec of exposure time.

9 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bais frames

Guided

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

DeepSkyStacker

Photoshop

 

My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap (what an amazing system for aligning). I'm not comfortable using my SCT as my lens yet. My solution is to piggyback my Sony a7RIII and adapted Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s on a ADM dovetail rail on the top of my optical tube. I used DeepSkyStacker to combine all frames and then processed the TIFF file in Photoshop. I stretched the 32 bit file and used Gradient XT on the image. I then made it a 16 bit file and stretched in level, then curves. I used the color sampler tool and levels to do my best to keep the background space black. I then using my skillset and relyed on Astronomy Tools Action Set, and dodging and burning a bit to give the image the finishing touches.

Done