The Phantom Galaxy
Spooky...
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My first take at the Phantom Galaxy was rough. This was taken in the beginning of my foray into astrophotography. I was still learning how to find and frame deep sky objects so seeing the galaxy in my test image was exciting. This was actually the first galaxy image! Before the ones of Andromeda and Triangulum! ... I know, not bad. Lets just not mention the editing.
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About a month into imaging deep sky objects, i started to get good at zeroing in on the objects i want to take pictures of. On this night, i had about 2 hours before the clouds would start to fill in so i though this was my chance to practice my setup routine and framing skills. I had gone through setup, alignment, collimation and focus and the time had come for finding and framing a target.
The Phantom galaxy is not too hard to find, if you can see but i was on it with only 6 test images! For context, i normally get into the 30s with little, dim objects like the Phantom galaxy.
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With the early nights starting after daylight savings in early November, I had a few hours to tune my polar alignment before Orion started to rise in the east around 10pm.
I wanted to get as much time on polar alignment as I could so after setting up and following the Meade Autofinder alignment process and zeroing in the right ascension settings with a star in the south, I set out to find a target in the east to get my declination set correctly. The Phantom galaxy is in the perfect place when it starts to get dark so i knew i would get a good 3 hours of exposure time before Orion came into view over the treetops.
After about an hour of watching and adjusting the dec, i had the tracking as close to spot-on as the mount would allow. I still get some star trailing with exposures over 30 seconds because the mount lacks any kind of bearing on the right ascension axis.
Even with the lack of bearings and lack of fine tuning RA and Dec knobs on the mount, i was able to tune in the alignment and collect about 200, good 30 second exposures. I'm still working with an f/8 telescope so small dim objects like the Phantom galaxy are still hard to capture.
