My Second M31 and Milky WayIt has been a while since I have done any astrophotography, mainly due to all the clouds and lack of a summer this year!
But anyway, last night was a surprisingly good night. For some reason, the sky was particularly clear and dark, and I could even just about make out the summer milky way in the sky! That was the first time I have seen it!!!
M31 was my target for the night, so I set about looking for it - and there it was! Visible by averted vision!!! The skies where I live are usually very light polluted which makes finding DSO's difficult, let alone imaging them.
These images were taken with my unmodified 350d mounted on an HEQ5 with a 70-300mm IS lens. The mount was not accurately polar aligned due to a tree being in front of Polaris. I used the drift method, which was good for 45-second exposures, however, I used 30-second exposures because I broke my remote switch and couldn't use the bulb setting. This image of M31 was created using 15x30 second exposures aligned and stacked with Photoshop.