A recent trip to the Spanish island of Menorca gave me a chance to see Sagittarius at the heart of the Milky Way. This rich region of sky is barely seen from the UK.

Despite a full moon, and Sagittarius hanging low above the Mediterranean, on the final day I couldn’t resist having a go with the D7000 to see if Deep Sky Stacker could pick out some of the detail.

The final processed image nicely captures the golden mass of the galactic core, intersected by the Great Rift. Objects visible include four bright nebulas; the Lagoon nebula (M8), Trifid (M20), Eagle (M16), and Omega nebula (M17) along with globular cluster M22 and several open clusters.

I’m happy with the result given the conditions and lack of barn door tracker, which limited shot time to 2-5 seconds. The images below show how well the stacking technique works, even on a bright moonlit night.

Details: Nikon D7000, Nikkor 50mm/f1.8 at f4. Untracked 14 minutes (168 x 5 seconds) at iso 1600. Using didymium filter and stacked with Deep Sky Stacker.

Here’s another close up of the Lagoon and Trifid nebulas taken at 105mm with the Nikkor 18-105mm lens. It picks them out reasonably well, with quite a bit more close up detail than the longer 50mm shot. However, I’ve realised if I want to improve these shots than I’ll need to use a lens better suited to the job. I have my eye on the ‘legendary‘ Nikkor 180mm f2.8 ED.. I’ll have no excuses then!

Details: Nikkor 18-105mm/f3.5-5.6 at f5.6. Untracked 3 minutes 20 seconds (100 x 2 seconds) at iso 6400. Using didymium filter and stacked with Deep Sky Stacker

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