Thanks to the full moon, it will be a few days before I am able to get back out with my telescope and start imaging again but I did get a pretty good shot on Sunday night of the distant galaxy NGC 2841.

I’m starting to notice that I have reached the limit of what I can accomplish with my current processing skills and I am going to have to spend some time learning some new techniques to get even better quality astrophotos.  Even so, I’m still pretty happy with this image and the amount of detail I got for a galaxy that is 46 million light years away.  They are very faint, but there are some even more distant galaxies that are just barely visible on the right side of the image.  They were a little brighter but as I was trying to fix some issues I was having with the image, they ended up a bit dimmer than I would have liked.  Oh well!  Sometimes things aren’t perfect when you are doing astrophotography!  But part of the fun comes from the challenge in getting a good quality astrophoto of a deek sky object like a galaxy or nebula.

For those wondering about the setup I use to take this image, check out my post from yesterday where I detail all of the equipment I use in my telescope setup for astrophotography.

As for the details about this particular image, I’ll list those below.  And if you want to see the full resolution version, click here!

Share this with any space lovers you know!  And make sure to go follow me on Instagram where I post a lot more of my astrophotography shots among other things.  If you aren’t following me on there, you are missing out on some really cool images!

Image details:

• Target: galaxy NGC 2841
• Exposure time:  3hr 4min
• Lights – 46  (4 min subs)  @ ISO 800
• Darks – 5
• Flats – 15
• Bias – 30
• Canon T1i (astro modified)
• Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
• Processed in Photoshop CS2