This is a close-up of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. When taking a photo of this star its own bright makes difficult to observe nearby stars in the field. The diffraction spikes almost reach the limits of the field. Jason Higley explains this way the picture:

"There were a number of processing things I experimented with to try to handle the noise, but all of them took away from the raw power of Sirius, so I just decided to only crop as much vignetting as possible and left it full-size with all it's defects but preserving the blinding star and it's beautiful color. Two 15 second exposures stacked using a Canon Powershot SX100 at ISO 1600, afocally mounted at a 26mm EP via a 6" Criterion RV-6 telescope."

You may check out his astro-gallery at the link below. All of the images in that gallery are from his point-n-shoot cameras, mostly Canon's, but there are a few from a Kodak and Panasonic there too.

by Jason Higley on 2009-08-01 01:41:03 [Original Size] - [Next Image] - [Author's gallery]