2020-01-23: Southern Milky Way Mosaic from Mauna Kea

Post date: Jan 23, 2020 3:38:26 PM

This is an image of the Southern Milky Way, centered on the constellation Vela with section from southern Puppis to Carina. The declination ranges from 30 degrees south to 65 degrees south. The Eta Carina Nebula is prominent in the lower left, and the "Southern Pleiades" is left of bottom center. The significant increase in brightening is where the Carina-Sagittarius arm appears ahead of the more distant Perseus arm.

The image was taken with a Nikkor 50 mm lens at F/3.2 on a modified Nikon D5200 camera, mounted on an Orion EQ-1M motorized mount. The mosaic consists of approximately 35 x 1 minute exposures at ISO1600, stacked in three panels. BackyardNikon was used to control the camera and processing was in PixInsight. The image is reduced by half to have 30 arc seconds per pixel.

The image was taken from Onizuka Center for International Astronomy on Manua Kea Hawaii on December 29, 2019.