Successful Test: Mulitple Night Stacking - M27 aka Dumbell Nebula

Having seen other astrophotographers not only stack a night's worth of images but now multiple night's worth of images of the same subject, I had to give it a try.

So last night I went out and took another 12 minutes of exposures of Messier 27 (M27). The sub images were 30 secs long at ISO 3200, again with my Meade LX200GPS 8" scope at prime focus using a Canon T2i camera body.

Then I took that stacked image and "stacked" it (using DeepSkyStacker freeware) with the previous night's 15 minutes of exposure resulting in a potential 27 minute overall exposure time.

Success! I was amazed that all the stars aligned, that the pinkish-reds were easier to pull out and many more faint stars appeared!

Here is the result! If you click on the image it will appear more full screen and you can toggle back and forth between it and the previous night's 15 minute stack. Enjoy His creation!

M27 - Total: 27 minutes of stacking exposures

M27: 15 minutes of stacking exposures

I am going to keep on adding more and more over the remainder of the summer and see how it turns out!