Last night we had a lovely clear sky, so I set up a mosaic with the Dwarf3 around the Triffid and Lagoon nebulae.
I applied my usual post processing steps, and I got almost as good a result as I got up in Beacon with the DwarfII. But only almost, and with twice as long an exposure.
Let's just look at that for a moment, because not all is as it seems.
The D3 has a 38mm aperture, and the D2 25mm. This means that the D3 has twice the light gathering capability of the D2, and has a more sensitive detector. So this image has four times the light gathered as the image in Beacon, but it is also a mosaic covering almost four times the area, so we come back down to the same amount of light per pixel as the D2 got in a true dark sky.
What this means is that if I had taken this shot last week in Beacon, it would have been truely spectacular!
2 hours 8 minutes total exposure, gain 80, Ha/OIII filter.
#Dwarf3 #SmartTelescope #Snapseed #Astrophotography #Astronomy #Astrodon #TriffidNebula #LagoonNebula #M8