Contains:  Extremely wide field
2015 May 23 ~ Starclouds in Scutum, Serpens Cauda & Sagittarius, Michael Watson

2015 May 23 ~ Starclouds in Scutum, Serpens Cauda & Sagittarius

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Description

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Photographed at Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada

* Temperature -4 degrees C.

Keen northern hemisphere stargazers wait all winter long for this area of our home Milky Way galaxy to emerge from behind the glare of the Sun and become visible in a dark night sky.

Two of the best known diffuse nebulae (gas clouds) appear at the right side in this view: M16 (the Eagle Nebula) is the upper pinkish cloud, and M17 (the Omega Nebula) lies below it. The centre of our Milky Way galaxy lies just to the lower right of the frame, in the constellation Sagittarius, some 25-28,000 light years from our solar system.

These four frames comprising this image were captured between 02.07 and 02.20 EDT, just an hour before the rising Sun brought dawn creeping into the northeastern sky, and brought my photography session to an end.

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Nikkor 24-70 mm f/2.8 lens on Nikon D810 camera body, mounted on Astrophysics 1100GTO equatorial mount

Four stacked frames; each frame:

Focal length 70 mm; ISO 1250; between 106 and 116 seconds exposure at f/5

*daylight colour balance

(with LENR - long exposure noise reduction)

Stacked in RegiStar;

Processed in Photoshop CS6 (brightness, contrast, levels)

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2015 May 23 ~ Starclouds in Scutum, Serpens Cauda & Sagittarius, Michael Watson