Pleiades

Well, I bought a new digital camera yesterday, and thought I would take advantage of some clear skies tonight.  I rested the GE X15 on the roof of the car and pointed it straight up and took a 10 second iso 1600 shot and managed to capture the Pleiades quite by accident.

There was a goodly amount of noise in the image, and I havent yet figured out how to filter that out using dark frames, etc., so the only processing I did was some brightness/contrast in Gimp.  I'm sure the image would be far better once I figure out how to filter out the noise.


Click on the image, and you'll see the nebulosity quite a bit better.


This is my first attempt at a "deep sky" photo.  I have taken some random star field shots that came out quite good, such as this one:

I dont believe I captured anything really interesting in this one, but the stars, some of them you cannot see visually, so I think this camera will be a useful tool in astrophotography.