Markarians Chain
29 Apr 2024It’s been ages since I got any clear sky, and now it’s galaxy season. This is not great for me because my equipment is relatively wide-field and most galaxies show up like tiny blotches in the middle of a bunch of stars. However, I’m keen to make the most of it so I thought I’d do Markarians Chain. I decided to approach this by taking lots of short exposures (60 secs) with regular dithering and stacking them with drizzle to try to extract some extra detail. On paper, this should have worked well but not so much in practice. Perhaps my sky isn’t dark enough, or my equipment is just not good enough, or perhaps I just didn’t spend enough time on it, but it’s not quite what I wanted. On the plus side, I did find that -20c gives less noise than -10c so that’s my new standard. I also experimented with the beta version of Siril with its new SPCC colour correction and proper bayer drizzle, and I spent some time to perfect my dark/flat/biases library. Hopefully this will pay off in better quality images in future. For now, here’s an annotated Markaians Chain
