Messier Marathon, take one
A beautiful night at the Astro Shed. The plan? Image as many of the Messier objects as I can.
Using a copy of the MessierMarathon.js which I got from Richard Wright’s blog, A New Messier Marathon Scripting Example, I set on my way. I don’t have the limits right for my scope yet, so I did in fact get a couple of really nice shots of the walls (sorry, I deleted those). When I give this a second take I will definitely add a focus run every so often - the temperature drop over the night caused quite a bit of drift in the later images.
After all was said and done I managed to get 87 out of the 110 Messier catalog objects. Many were competing with moonglow. Each image is a 300 second monochrome image, all luminance, and each were calibrated with a master dark, superbias, and 30 flats. I did very little postprocessing. I could have skipped a few, because in many instances there are more than one object in the same field of view. These were all taken with my Takahashi FSQ-106edx-v4, an Atik 16200 mono camera, and a Paramount MyT.
Here is a full shot of the gallery. If you want to see each of the individual images and their blurry goodness, scroll down to the bottom of the post.
![Full Gallery](/assets/images/posts/messier-marathon/full-gallery.jpg)
Click through the pictures to see what I captured. Way too many of them are out of focus.
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