I went out to Joshua Tree during a new Moon and took some long exposures. I was there three nights. The first night, I got some good pictures of the whirlpool galaxy and the leo trio. The second night, I was totally clouded out. And the third night the wind was so high I had to take much shorter exposures of the Orion nebula, the horse head & flame nebulas, the M3 globular, and some milkyway.
My main targets were the whirlpool galaxy and the leo trio, each of which were exposed for an hour with six 10min exposures. On the third night, I tried to take an hour worth of 30sec exposures for each target, but due to the wind and clouds, I rejected some of the exposures. The horsehead and flame nebula picture only uses 26.5min of total exposure. The Orion nebula picture only uses 17.5min of total exposure. And the M3 picture is 40.5min of total exposure.
I didn't take any dark frames that night, so I tried to take some dark frames at home weeks later by putting my camera in the refrigerator to approximate the temperature the nights of the trip. It wasn't perfect, so there's lots of stacking noise. I also need to learn how to take flat frames to get rid of the vignette in my images.
The whirlpool galaxy has a small companion galaxy (NGC 5195) - the bright spot at the end of one of the arms - which possibly crossed through the disk of the whirlpool galaxy millions of years ago.
