After learning the skies, and learning the equipment we wanted to delve further into deep space, after all planets are fun and awesome to look at but, other than on the internet we had never seen a real galaxy! I did some research and decided to try and photograph Andromeda, it was reasonably close at 2.5 million light years away, was big at 3 degree’s in width and was reasonably bright, you can see Andromeda with your naked eyes on a dark night (look for Cassiopeia and draw a line out from the second peak at the bottom of the ‘W’ shape and Andromeda is about a fists width down that line.
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So Toby and I went out and setup the scope and slewed it to Andromeda, because of our previous experiences and knowledge we actually found Andromeda within half an hour of setting up. It looked quite impressive through the telescope and was a big bright smudge on the sky. We attached the Camera, focused and started snapping away!
This is what we got! I wanted more detail though so set the exposure time for 1 minute. Pressed the shutter and waited.. The camera clicked and we looked at the photo It was all blurry! Every star was trailing? We tried a few more times with different exposures, ISO settings but everytime all we got was a messy blur!
So it seemed we needed to study alot more….