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LMC - untracked from the Atacama desert, GalacticRAVE
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LMC - untracked from the Atacama desert

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
LMC - untracked from the Atacama desert, GalacticRAVE
Powered byPixInsight

LMC - untracked from the Atacama desert

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Description

Well, I had the fortune and opportunity of two dark-time nights on the platform of Paranal observatory (where ESO‘s four 8m VLT are located), one of which with seeing constantly between 0.3-0.5“! Desert skies over the Atacama are so breathtaking! It also was a quite pleasant night otherwise with temperatures around 15C and the wind only fairly modest (I can be quite hefty on the platform). The Magellanic clouds were however still very low over the horizon (at Paranal, one actually can see the stars raising and setting), and I only had my DSLR, three fixed focal length lenses and a tripod - and also very limited time. But the opportunity was too good to pass. So I decided to go for the  LMC with my beloved Samyang 135 - without tracker! Luckily, the declination of the clouds is high, so at 3 sec exposure stars are only moderately egg shaped, something „correct only“ in BlurXterminator can handle pretty well. Given the boundaries, I also had no other choice than to have the lens wide open at f=2. So I gathered some 300 exposures a 3 sec, ie the total time still short enough so the stacked image did not need too much cropping. While the camera was busily clicking and saving files, above us the 4 lasers of UT4 were cutting into the MIlky Way - what a sight! Afterwords my laptop and PixInsight were quite busy processing 339 full frame subs. Despite the new moon desert sky, there was some gradient in the image owing to the low height of the LMC but GraXpert AI (beta) easily removed it. So overall quite a bit of effort for a 900s image, but better this LMC than no LMC …Hope that I get another chance on some other day (and maybe can squeeze my carry on luggage a bit further to get a star tracker in).

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