Nothing crazy actually, however it is much easier to capture if using a tracking mount which follows the movement of the night sky, allowing for longer exposures.

I used a 10" goto Dobsonian for this image, but I'm sure you can get similar results with an 8. A goto or tracking setup will make your life easier but it isn't necessary especially if you have a larger camera sensor

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Thank you sir! I'm hoping to shoot more data when the weather clears up

There's no way to get a single 1-second exposure to look that good with any amateur telescope, maybe even any man-made telescope at all

It's a combination of all 3600 pictures assembled together using a method called rejection stacking in order to reduce noise.

OP took 3600 pictures of 1 second exposure each ( the sensor capture light particles for 1sec for each picture )

Then OP takes all 3600 pictures to a stacking software ( we don't know which one OP chose, but there are many like SiriL, DSS, etc )

The software will align all the pictures using the stars. Then it'll average out every single pixel ( ie. pixel in the same location in the sky, hence why it needs to align the pictures )

The stacking process will reduce the noise created by the camera sensor ( and there is a looooot of it ), and keep what we call signal ( so the actual light from stars and galaxies and stuff ) at roughtly the same level.

When seeing a 1sec exposure, you will think there is litterally no light from the galaxy that reached your camera, but it did ! It's so low that it's almost black ! Keyword here being ALMOST black, so it's there !

Once the noise has been removed by stacking, you take your stacked image ( only 1 file usually in .tif/.fit format ) and process it in a software like Photoshop, gimp and so on.

Now you just need to carefully use "level adjustments" and "curve adjustments" ( not sure about my grammar of adjustments ) to bring all the data in the near-black to the grey/dark-grey zone, and you're basically done !

Hope it helped ! I didn't go too much into the explanation because I tried to keep it as simple as possible ! Astrophotography is a really nice ( but becomes expensive ) hobby, I suggest you to take a quick look into it !

Whenever you take a photo, the image sensor is exposed to light for some amount of time. The duration of this time period where the sensor is capturing light is called "exposure time" or "shutter speed." By increasing this duration, the sensor receives more light, which is useful for taking photos of dim objects (for example, a 2 second exposure gets twice the light as a 1 second exposure). However, this has a tradeoff - if the camera or object moves before the exposure finishes, then there will be blur in the image. This is why photos taken under low light tend to be blurrier, since there is more of a chance that camera will shake in your hands or the subject will move.

When you take photos in daytime, you usually use a shutter speed of from 1/8000th of a second to 1/30th of a second. However, at night photographing dim objects, these kinds of shutter speeds will not give you any reasonable signal - more or less just a black frame. As such, you take exposures of 1 second or more to gather as much light as possible without incurring blur from the sky rotating (tracking mounts help with this).

However, for dim objects like galaxies, even 1 second exposures don't capture enough signal compared to the overall noise level of the camera. As such, we can take many 1 second exposures and stack them together by aligning the frames (done by aligning the stars in the image together) and then adding the pixel values. This results in an increased signal to noise ratio, allowing us to make a more detailed image once properly edited.

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