Wide field astrophotography

As I found my enthusiasm on the rise with recent my success in capturing fair amount of detail of the Orion nebula using nothing but a tripod and a still camera, I got myself a fast 55mm lens that would capture even more detail.. or so, I had hoped. 

I could not wait for the moon to get into its waning phase again for me to try out the new lens. Played around a little with the focusing which is so hard to do with these miniature viewfinders set in neck-breaking angles to get the object in view.

After spending quite a bit of shots that were blurry out-of-focus, such as this one:

I decided to try to preview the picture taken in the camera itself, duh!

Turns out, this was good enough for me to get the right level of focus to try to get pin-pointed stars..

and so, I set the aperture to 1.8 and fired off, took some darks and a bias frame or two.

DeepSkyStacker to stack them and here is the final version:

As you can see, lot more detail but it still feels a bit over-exposed.

So, I have to wait another night to see if I can do better by stopping "up" a little or decreasing the exposure times to about a sec.

Will try both and update.. stay tuned.

Meanwhile, quite pleased with the lens, though there is quite a bit of vignetting seen near the edges, as expected.