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ZWO Seestar s50 Smart Telescope
Directly off the Seestar s50 into Starfixer.org to reduce 'star bloat'. Cropped.
NGC 3621 - The Southern Cross Galaxy. (and an unexpected surprise)
Thursday night, 18th April, I was trying so hard to image this little galaxy sitting at 22 million light years away. I just picked it randomly from a long list of targets available that night. The entire session was interrupted by passing satellites leaving streaks on the exposures every 10 minutes or so. After almost 3 hours and so many frames getting dropped with field rotation problems leaving star trails and the annoying satellites, I gave up.
Friday morning I decided to try stacking all the frames and manually removing the ones with streaks. This was the result. At the time, I thought "Meh.." and then discarded the result but kept the subs. Total integration time for the image was 63 minutes after removing many tainted exposures.
It wasn't until Saturday morning I realized how special this little photo is when I saw a post by an Astro Photographer at the Byron Bay Observatory on Instagram. So I went back to my data, stacked again and there it was.
I found that I had just captured a supernova! My mind was blown.