Last night was nice and clear, so I took some more star photos. I've automated my technique for aligning multiple images. None of the auto aligners I found worked very well, so I wrote my own in Mathematica. Mathematica is a program for doing some serious math, but it worked well for this purpose.
Here, I used a lens zoomed to about 45 mm and took ten 8-second exposures. Then, I lined them up and added them together. I was aiming for the Andromeda galaxy, and I think I found it. I think it is that smudge about 1/4 of the way down and 1/3 of the way from the left.
I found aiming the camera to be very difficult. hardly anything is visible through the view finder or on the LCD screen. All these stars show up after adding many images together.
I was having a hard time figuring out where in the sky I was with this, because of all the stars that showed up in the processing. Now, I have it. If I had rotated this 90 degrees to the right (can I do that now? Anybody?) It looks like a zoomed version of the shot that I took with the clouds two days earlier.
Hi frogger - if you apy approx $20 per year you c an become an "ace" member - it gives you three albums to use (so allows 3 uploads on one day and allows you to organize what goes in each one) but it also gives you free online access to the Picmonkey editing program. It's really useful because it lets you edit after uploading - so you could easily rotate this. :)
