Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Sagittarius (Sgr)  ·  Contains:  11 Sgr  ·  11.29  ·  11.41  ·  13 mu. Sgr  ·  14 Sgr  ·  15 Sgr  ·  16 Sgr  ·  17 Sgr  ·  21 Sgr  ·  419 Aurelia  ·  5 Astraea  ·  B297  ·  B301  ·  B302  ·  B303  ·  B304  ·  B306  ·  B307  ·  B308  ·  B309  ·  B310  ·  B311  ·  B312  ·  B85  ·  B91  ·  B92  ·  B93  ·  B99  ·  Checkmark Nebula  ·  IC 1274  ·  And 247 more.
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Milky Way #14, Molly Wakeling
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Milky Way #14

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Milky Way #14, Molly Wakeling
Powered byPixInsight

Milky Way #14

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Another shot from my dark-sky weekend -- the heart of the Milky Way! I set up my Vixen Polarie star tracker, Nikon D5300 DSLR, and one of my more recent acquisitions, the Rokinon 135mm f/2 lens, and aimed it somewhere in the Milky Way as it rose around midnight. Visible here are quite a few things: in the upper left is M17, the Swan Nebula; the starry region above center is M24, the Sagittarius Star Cloud; cut off on the right side of the image is M20, the Trifid Nebula; the small open cluster in the center-left is NGC 6645; and the larger open cluster below and to the right of that is M25. It's a rich region of stars, glowing gas, and dark dust. 😃

The Vixen Polarie is hard to polar align without buying the expensive polar alignment module, so the image drifted quite a bit over the course of the night. Because of this, I stacked it using the Mosaic mode in DeepSkyStacker (after calibrating in PixInsight), and then did the rest of the processing in PixInsight. The enormous number of frames meant that I didn't have to do any denoising; the image was pretty much noiseless, even with this uncooled DSLR!

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Milky Way #14, Molly Wakeling