Last Saturday I had full intentions to head down to a location with very dark southern skies in order to attempt Rho Ophiuchi.



However in the last minute the weather forecast looked bad in the south, so I decided to head east where it looked to stay clear. This was a very nice spot as well, the southern skies were not the best but north and east were fantastic.



I decided to just get some more data on M81 with my F/6 scope and save Rho for another trip elsewhere.



However I was very curious about the skies where I was, and having Rho out that late was very tempting. So easily enough I plunked down my tripod and former D5200 camera with the Samyang 135mm F/2 lens and decided to take a quick 1 second exposure. It turned out 1.3" was the perfect combo not to get any trailing. I set the ISO first to 6400 but decided maybe 3200 would be more forgiving. After a quick live view focus on Antares, I set my camera's intervalometer and it was off firing like a machine gun.



I went back to mingle with some of the others, occasionally heading back to reposition back Antares in the center. After a few rounds of this I found out to find that my memory card was full. I should have saved just RAW not RAW+JPG but anyway, I had over 700 frames taken! Seems reasonable.



Not knowing if I've captured anything, I decided to stack these images in DSS as I bet Pixinsight would have taken ages. DSS was actually quite good. I was curious about the final step where it calculates, it took around 16 minutes to finish that step. The prior registering and stacking also took quite some and luckily enough it was successful!



I was surprised at the results that it was all there, fairly covered in sky glow as I was not using any filter. Rho is very low in our skies here. Anyway here is the result, I hope to give it a more serious attempt on my main rig and with better skies but I had a lot of fun with this!