Virgo Cluster
Here is a 3.5 hour exposure of the Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster is a group of galaxies that are fairly close to each other, located roughly 55-65 million light years away. At at dark sky with a decent sized telescope, many of these galaxies can be seen close to each other. This cluster of Galaxies also contains a very famous Galaxy named M87. It is the Galaxy that we got our first photo of a black hole in.
Details of How the shot was Taken
Gear:
Gear:
- Olympus OMD EM-5 Micro 4/3 camera
- Skywatcher Star Adventurer (Unguided)
- Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 lens
- Home made dew heater
- Made with nichrome wire wrapped in duct tape, which is powdered by a lipo battery
- 210x60 Seconds (3.5 Hours)
- 800 iso @ 150mm (300 equivalent) F2.8
- 50 Flat Frames
- 50 Dark Frames
- 50 Bias Frames
- Taken: May 6, 2019
- Images processed in DeepSkyStacker
- 2x Drizzle Stack
- Brought Saturation to 17 and match all rgb levels
- Photoshop Adjustments:
- Cropped to remove stacking errors
- Adjust Levels to bring Histogram to the front
- Used RC-Astro's Gradient xterminator to remove the gradient the flats couldn't fix
- Adjust Colour balance to adjust background colour to be neutral
- Used Deep Sky Colours HLVG tool to remove any unnecessary greens in the photo
- Used Astronomy tools make stars smaller and sharper
- Also Ran a tool to decrease deep space noise
- Increased the Saturation
- Increased sharpness from inaccurate focusing
- Exported into jpeg