Astrophotography Intro

[Isidore]

All -
Kinda new here (again) and wanted to share my latest non-musical hobby... Astrophotography. I shot this with a standard DSLR and 70-300mm lens (no telescope). It was sitting on my telescope's tracking head (Celestron AVX) and this is a combination of ~20min of exposure (combinations of 30s exposures). Anyhoo... hope you all enjoy.

Orion_nebula-v2

• Isidore
• May 21, 2018
• 2

Orion_nebula_zoom

• Isidore
• May 21, 2018

 

[bostjan]

That's awesome.

When I was a kid, I used to do this with film. I used hydrogen gas to make the film expose faster and got extremely mixed results. I never got any photos of deep space objects anywhere near that quality. A big part of my problem was that I was using a 4" refraction telescope, which just doesn't grab as much light, but it has better magnification, so I was able to get a few decent shots of Jupiter, Saturn, and even Mars, and a few shots of the lunar surface with mylar filters. ...and a whole lot of wasted film.

The fact that you got that without a telescope is super impressive, to me, at least. What telescope(s) do you have, though?

 

[Isidore]

That's awesome.

When I was a kid, I used to do this with film. I used hydrogen gas to make the film expose faster and got extremely mixed results. I never got any photos of deep space objects anywhere near that quality. A big part of my problem was that I was using a 4" refraction telescope, which just doesn't grab as much light, but it has better magnification, so I was able to get a few decent shots of Jupiter, Saturn, and even Mars, and a few shots of the lunar surface with mylar filters. ...and a whole lot of wasted film.

The fact that you got that without a telescope is super impressive, to me, at least. What telescope(s) do you have, though?

Awesome!! I eventually will get the gas filters.
My rig:
Celestron 6" SCT (Schmidt-Cassegrain)
ZWO ASI120-MC
Orion Starshoot Autoguider w/ guide scope
Celestron StarSense Polar Alignment
Nikon D5500 (crop sensor)
Nikon 70-300mm lens
Nikon "nifty fifty" (50mm prime, f/1.8 man focus)f

 

[odibrom]

Nice, the most I've done about this was shooting the moon. Got some decent photos with my old trusty DSLR Canon camera...

 

[ramis]

Wow! It's very cool!

 

[alessandroarzilli]

That's sooo great! I'm very new to astrophotography (I've only uploaded one videoclip of the Full Moon on my YouTube channel and it came out pretty bad, lol). Can you tell us what DSLR and 300mm lens were you using and at what F and SS ? Great pictures, really!!!!

 

[Isidore]

That's sooo great! I'm very new to astrophotography (I've only uploaded one videoclip of the Full Moon on my YouTube channel and it came out pretty bad, lol). Can you tell us what DSLR and 300mm lens were you using and at what F and SS ? Great pictures, really!!!!

Thx! Here goes..

Nikon D5500
Nikon 70-300mm lens, manual focus at 300
ISO 800
f/11 (should have done more open)
approximately 22 exposures at 30s each stacked and editing in PixInsight

For your moon thing, you may have a better image than you think.
Download these: a program called PIPP (Planetary Image Pre-Processor). PIPP can turn EVERY FRAME of the video into a tiff as well as center & align.
AutoStakker3! or Registax. You take those images created by PIPP and load it into one of those and stack them. When it does that, it can bring out a LOT of details. Takes learning curve, but several resources out there. If you don't mind, i'm going to play with part of your footage. I just checked it out... you have a LOT to work with. I think you'll be really surprised at what you actually did capture. My 1st time taking a vid i did and stacking it blew my mind. Keep in mind, you're shooting at 25frames/sec. That means 25 pictures PER SECOND of footage. This is an example of what you can do with 20 images (less than 1s... not my image). Now imagine 2500 (+/- throw away frames).

 

[Isidore]

Alessandro - i took your vid and downloaded it (compressed youtube = not as clear as could be and reduced size of 720p). This is a stack of about 40 images (just shy of 2secs of footage). This is YOUR moon from YOUR after-youtube-compressed/shrunk video. You can do a LOT with that you have. Didn't spend a lot of time on it (work and all), but wanted to give you an idea of what you have available. If you were to do this same thing with your original footage, you'd probably get a fantastic result. PS: Def go back into registrax with whichever final image.... the wavelet sharpening feature it has is superb, even over photoshop and others.

 

[alessandroarzilli]

That's insanely wonderful! I'm checking out more in details everything you wrote, soon. Thank you so much!