The constellation of Ursa Major

 

 Some galaxies in this constellation

 

 The Plough in twilight from a fixed tripod

On an unexpected clear night after rain I decided to take some more demonstration shots to show what can be done on a fixed tripod: NO telescope, NO guiding, NO dark or flat frames. Individual exposures had to be short to avoid star trails. I used my Canon 24-105mm zoom lens on Canon EOS 5D Mk II camera. I focussed on bright stars (Arcturus and Vega) using the camera's live view magnified by 10.

Canon EOS 5D MkII ISO6400
Canon 24-105mm L IS lens at 24mm, f/4.8
Fixed tripod, 69 x 8s = 9.2 minutes total exposure
2014 Aug 23 at 21:03:31 - 21:13:51 UT
From Rookhope 54.8N 2.1W 330m asl. Rural, almost no light pollution (3 Bortles)

I processed the same set of images in other ways too (in GRIP). Using the menu option "Batch/Astro/Accumulate star trails" uses the brightest value in every pixel position throughout the set and produces this:

Simply averaging the images gives this weaker result in which satellite trails have faded away:

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Index page of constellations