M15 - First Attempt

Lovely night tonight! I snuck out for two hours before the big gibbous moon rose at about 10:30 PM local time. Transparency was excellent! The Milky Way was very clear, and I could see M31 in Andromeda naked eye.

Below is my first attempt at M15, the lovely globular cluster in Pegasus. Not brilliant. I had a real issue with focusing the scope, as is evident in the image. Still, managed to capture globular detail. These were very short exposures (15 second exposures) but stacked tog et about 3 minutes, 45 seconds worth of data.

M15 is 33,600 light years away from us and is about ten light years in diameter.

Image Details:
3 minutes 45 seconds (15 second stacked images) @ ISO1600
Nikon D40
Meade LX200 8" @ F6.3
Processed in Deep Sky Stacker
Mild sharpening and curve adjustment in Photoshop
Noise reduction in Neat Image