Over the weekend we had some nice, clear skies so like usual, I was out taking full advantage of them and pointing my telescope out into the cosmos.  In this particular case, I was pointing them at the galaxy NGC 2403.

The picture above is my my photo (click here for the full size image) that I took Saturday night / Sunday morning of NGC 2403.  So what exactly is NGC 2403 anyway?

NGC 2403 is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis.  Depending on where you get your space information, it seems to range from 8 million light years away (Wikipedia) or 10 million light-years away (NASA).  It contains a bunch of star forming regions and is approximately 50,000 light-years across.

No matter how far away it is, its kind of cool to think that photons from that galaxy have been traveling uninterrupted through space for millions of years only to end up running into my telescope.

I know a lot of people are interested in the technical details of the setup I used to acquire this shot as well as what camera settings I used to capture this image so you can find those below.

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My telescope setup:

• Celestron C9.25″ Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope
• Celestron Advanced VX mount
• Starlight Instruments FeatherTouch Microfocuser
• Orion’s Mini-Magnificent Autoguider Package
• Meade .63 Focal Reducer
• Canon T1i DSLR (modified for astrophotography)

As for the image itself:

• 4 minute sub-exposures @ ISO 800
• 5 Darks, 15 Flats, 30 Bias images
• NGC 2403 total exposure time: 3hr 40min
• Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
• Processed in Photoshop CS2

Clear skies!