July 29 2005 - M3, M11, M15, M29, M56

M56: 225 second exposure @ ISO 400 (15x15secs). 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. This is my first ever M56 shot and to tell you the truth i did not even think that my tiny 80mm slow f10 telescope would even capture this rather faint globular cluster but low and behold mty camera amazed me once more time. It is not a NASA picture by all means but I am just happy i could resolve the brighter stars of the cluster.



M29: 70 second exposure @ ISO400 (7x10secs). 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. Well nothing too exciting with this open cluster.



M15: 120 second exposure @ ISO 400 (12x10secs), 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. i think this one would come out better in my 5" telescope but I like this one for the wide field aspect of the picture.



M11: 180 second exposure @ ISO 400 (12x15secs), 80mm f10 celestron refractor canon G3 digital camera. Atlast! some sucess with this baby! i have treid this cluster many times both with my 10" Lx200 and my 5" starmax and the pics came out so bad i didn't even bother processing them but this one came out much better. i guess the wider FOV of my 80 mm does the trick here!



M3: 165 second exposure @ ISO 400 (11x15sec), 80mm f10 celestron refractor, canon G3 digital camera. This was my first image of the night. Just as i had my scope polar aligned and had my camera all ready and so on, my neigbour who lives on the upper levels of the house kindly decided to turn on his security light! Let me tell you it was so bright that i could read my starmaps with out my red flashlight! i could even read the small words! So as you can imaginge, barely being able to see the stars it took me about 15 minutes to locate the cluster. Once i did, i took these images and needless to say, the original raw images had a TON of sky glow caused by the light which was only about 10 feet away from me! So Ill have to try this cluster yet again under better conditions! Lucky for me, he did turn it off about an hour later and I was able to see many things. one highlight of this night was the very very bright and colourfall shooting star which at the end it kindof made a small explosion and left a nice smoke trail! Very nice indeed