At the front of Leo is the bright barred spiral galaxy, NGC 2903. Dan Self has recently produced an image using the 20″ (http://farawaythings.blogspot.com/2011/02/lions-head-galaxy.html) but I decided on the slightly different approach of using longer 3 minute ISO 800 exposures. Thin high cloud caused some problems with the auto-guider and I found myself using 5 second guide exposures which is a little long for this telescope. This has resulted in rather poor shaped stars.
The longer exposures have helped to reveal the faint arms of the galaxy and the fainter background galaxies but there’s a lot more noise in this picture as a result of only gathering 11 frames. The next opportunity I will try and increase my collection to see what improvements this will bring.
