Last night (March 17; St. Patrick’s Day) I was up at my brother’s place near Mountsberg, Ontario, to try out my newest acquisition, a Tamron 300mm f/2.8 telephoto lens for my Canon Digital Rebel 300D.

It is a very difficult challenge trying to find a way to properly mount this thing on my Super-Polaris equatorial mount, but the way I did it last night was OK for then.

I took several 30-second and 1-minute exposures of M44 (the Beehive Cluster, pictured below) the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades.

I must say, I was quite surprised at how much stuff I was able to get, just from keeping the shutter open by one minute or less! Any more than one minute gets pretty close to the Hamilton-GTA area’s ‘light fog limit’. If it’s this good from anywhere around here, I can imagine what it could do 400 km up north…

The following M44 image is a gamma-corrected, colour-balanced and contrasted excerpt from a 1-minute exposure at f/2.8 at ISO 1600 setting.