M1 The Crab Nebula

On December 21, 2008, I went on a short observing session, which was haunted by several problems with my setup. However, I did manage to pull off a picture of M1, aka the Crab Nebula, with my Vixen refractor and my Canon EOS 350D digital reflex. This object is just a smudge of light of about 7 x 5 arcminutes across, so it's really small compared with the whole frame, which I had to heavily crop. Here is the result:

Some info on the picture: Vixen ED103 SWT refractor, Canon EOS 350D DSLR, 11 x 10-minute individual exposures, 3 dark frames, autoguiding with the MagZero MZ-5m and an 80-mm guide scope. Processing done with DeepSkyStacker and Adobe Photoshop CS3. Zenithal sky brightness measured with SQM-L: 20.60.

This shot is plagued by quite a few defects (namely, bad focusing and tracking), but it can make do as my first attempt at shooting M1. More (and hopefully better ones) will come!