My first reasonable picture using the Skywatcher 130/650 PDS; therefore this is to be seen as the first light for the scope. I have done several tests with the Nikon D80 but that never turned out well. So, I returned to the D800 with all the drawbacks such camera has.

The sky was clear, no clouds obstructed the view. However, later the night the moon came up. Fortunately this did not affect the images that much.

I did 50 lights and 10 darks with each set to 120 seconds (resulting in 118 seconds due to 2 second mirror lockup). Installed a Baader Moon & Sky filter which helped a lot to reduce the light pollution.

Andromeda Galaxy

It’s slowly getting better… However still a lot more to learn and much more hours to spend on this. Improvements need to be on Alignment, (Auto-)Focus and Software usage. Also the Skywatcher shows high coma, therefore a coma corrector made it to the list of enhancements.