Astrophotography, anyone?

I've always been a fan of photography, always messing around with the Nikon SLRs we had when I was in high school. I'm by no means a pro, but I enjoy capturing things that interest me. I never had an SLR of my own until I picked up a Canon 60D in 2012 for a business trip I took to Prague.

I got it about two months before my trip, so I had a chance to really mess around with it, but one thing I'd always wanted to do was take a picture of the moon. My kit lens was only an 18-200mm lens, but my neighbor let me borrow his EF-S 55-250mm, which gave me just a little extra focal length to work with. This was my very first attempt, very little processing done.

I eventually decided I wanted to capture some stars, and other deep space objects, but this was well before I learned about stacking photos, long exposures, and the need for a tracking mount to get long exposures to let in lots of light and get the most data, and have no star trails. This was my first attempt at the Orion nebula later that year:

Some time later, I got my hands on one of those fancier USM 400mm lenses, with a 2x teleconverter, giving me an 800mm focal length. Still using a crop body camera meant that the focal length was "effectively" 1280mm because of the 1.6 crop factor of the sensor.

We had a good view of the blood moon in 2014, so I tried my hand at that:

Those were the natural colors I was getting, no additonal coloring was done in post, and I didn't do much to bring out any detail either. Looking at some of these, I see now I could go back and really sharpen these raws better as my post-processing skills have improved somewhat. Here's another shot that I was really proud of at the time:

I eventually got a solar filter as well, and was able to capture the sun:

I eventually got too busy to continue taking photos religiously, and never got the mounting equipment and such that I needed to really take the kinds of photos I wanted, and I could never pull the trigger on an upgrade to a full-frame camera.

For my birthday this year, I opted to finally get a mirrorless SLR, taking advantage of the lighter weight and smaller form factor making it easier to travel with than going with the 5D MkIV I was eying. The R5 had all the features I wanted in an upgrade, so it was a no-brainer, with the exception that it didn't get here til the end of October. My birthday was in August, and I ordered it the day it was available three weeks earlier. At any rate, amazing camera, even for terrestrial stuff.

First light, as they call it, was with the Blue Moon on Halloween of this year:

I also got myself a guided mount, and decided to give it a shot on the Orion nebula again, this time using 135mm Rokinon lens I also got along with the new camera. My post processing skills still need lots of work, but this is the result of 60, 30-second exposures, stacked and then processed to the best of my ability, trying to deal with the light pollution around where I live since getting out to dark sky areas is impossible for me at the moment:

This is definitely a vast improvement from my first attempt 8 years ago, and I still have much more to learn and do, but I figured I'd share this with y'all, and I hope y'all enjoyed it!

Corse to the white paging telephone......

I said the White paging telephone.

Those are some fantastic captures!  I can tell you right now there's a lot more data in orion's nebula you could extract.  How many darks/bias/lights did you take of it?

Thank you!

I took 65 lights, of which 5 I rejected, 15 darks, 15 biases, and 20 flats.

I've since started taking dark flats as well, and have increased the number of darks that I can reasonably take without spending too much time. I don't have a means to really automate with an intervalometer with the R5 at the moment.

I also used a CLS filter, to kinda help with the light pollution, which didn't seem to hurt the detail on this nebula after filtering it out. I'm using a trial of PixInsight right now, but it's about to run out and I can't justify the cost for the software, Siril is bugged and doesn't like the new CR3 format, so that leaves me with using DSS to stack and then PS to edit. I still have A LOT to learn.

I cut it out in the crop, but I was also able to get the horsehead nebula, just not as well.

I've switched from PS to pixinsight, since it has pretty incredible ability to remove light pollution, background noise, and various other things that can take your photos to the next level.  Photoshop is certainly a great place to start though.  The algorithms for stacking in pixinsight even allow for comets now, which is somewhat new.  I quite like it.

Super awesome there's more people on here into this!  I love doing astrophotography.  What are you using for guide software?

Yeah, that's what I love about Pixinsight is the sheer power of the software! It really simplifies a lot of it, and takes out the guesswork on removing unwanted noise and LP. I might just have to get it after all, because going back to PS seems like a massive step back.

I wish I had this gear back when Neowise was going by, I'd have gotten some far better photos!

Glad to know I'm not alone! As for guiding, I'm using the iOptron SkyGuider pro and I'm loving it. Thinking about replacing the polar scope with the camera they offer, so I can use the laptop to get a more accurate polar alignment. I also need to ditch the stock base mount. It's probably my biggest complaint, and I find myself losing polar alignment when I tighten up the mount. William Optics make a really robust unit that I'm going to get.

I'll probably stick with this mount and guiding for a while, even after I pick up a dedicate mono cooled camera. I'll get something far more beefy when I eventually get a much larger telescope.

My next optic is likely going to be something from William Optics as well, the built in Bahtinov mask, as well as the size for travel and the focal length make it really compelling. I've browsed Astrobin to see what people do with various optics, and I've seen some fantastic results with the ZenithStar 61 and a DSLR!

Timely thread! We were thinking about trying to get a decent dobsonian telescope for in-system photography and viewing for Christmas this year..  We think the deep space stuff might be a bit out of touch for our younger kids, whereas seeing saturn's rings or the red spot is pretty comprehensible.

Are any of you guys doing that?

I'd actually love to do some planetary imaging! I've discovered that due to the rotation, the best bet is to actually take videos and simply stack those frames.

This is about as close as I've gotten for Jupiter with my 800mm focal length, two photos, one overexposed to capture the moons, and the second with a much faster shutter speed to grab the Jovian colors:

And this is the best I've managed of Saturn:

Both of these were taken with the 60D. I haven't tried the R5 yet on planets. I do think I need some better optics before I can get better planetary detail myself. I wish I had some more helpful advice, but I'd honestly say to head over to astrobin, and under "Explore", select "The Big Wall/Advanced Search" and search up the objects you'd like to observe. There you'll see what optics they used, what camera, etc.

Here's the Celestron C14 Edge, rather pricey and not a Dobsonian, but it certainly gets you close:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaZmf8ecWOw

Azryael said:

I'd actually love to do some planetary imaging! I've discovered that due to the rotation, the best bet is to actually take videos and simply stack those frames.

This is about as close as I've gotten for Jupiter with my 800mm focal length, two photos, one overexposed to capture the moons, and the second with a much faster shutter speed to grab the Jovian colors:

And this is the best I've managed of Saturn:

Both of these were taken with the 60D. I haven't tried the R5 yet on planets. I do think I need some better optics before I can get better planetary detail myself. I wish I had some more helpful advice, but I'd honestly say to head over to astrobin, and under "Explore", select "The Big Wall/Advanced Search" and search up the objects you'd like to observe. There you'll see what optics they used, what camera, etc.

Here's the Celestron C14 Edge, rather pricey and not a Dobsonian, but it certainly gets you close:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaZmf8ecWOw

You've got some nice equipment to catch that up real close! I would love to capture the stars and our planets at night if only I have the necessary gadgets. Love your photos!

I appreciate it! Here's the lens and converter I used.

WonkoTheSane (FS) said:

Timely thread! We were thinking about trying to get a decent dobsonian telescope for in-system photography and viewing for Christmas this year..  We think the deep space stuff might be a bit out of touch for our younger kids, whereas seeing saturn's rings or the red spot is pretty comprehensible.

Are any of you guys doing that?

I haven't done any planetary photography since I had my dobsonian.  99% of the stuff I do is DeepSpace since there's more light to play with on my aperture.  I'm on a 72mm astrotech refractor.

Here's my current setup (although my tracking scope and camera isn't on in this pic)

Here's an old acquisition of Orion.  This is around 30 lights, dark and bias photos.

This is a fairly grainy composition of horsehead and flame nebula, it was only about 10 lights though.  Decent light pollution so after background extraction I was left with some odd artifact lines, but it still was pretty good.

This is a pretty grainy grab of the christmas tree nebula.  I think this was around 15 lights, it was a little out of focus but I still liked it.

This one I was pretty proud of, approximately 30 lights, this is the Triangulum Galaxy (messier 33).

Azryael said:

I'd actually love to do some planetary imaging! I've discovered that due to the rotation, the best bet is to actually take videos and simply stack those frames.

This is about as close as I've gotten for Jupiter with my 800mm focal length, two photos, one overexposed to capture the moons, and the second with a much faster shutter speed to grab the Jovian colors:

And this is the best I've managed of Saturn:

Both of these were taken with the 60D. I haven't tried the R5 yet on planets. I do think I need some better optics before I can get better planetary detail myself. I wish I had some more helpful advice, but I'd honestly say to head over to astrobin, and under "Explore", select "The Big Wall/Advanced Search" and search up the objects you'd like to observe. There you'll see what optics they used, what camera, etc.

Here's the Celestron C14 Edge, rather pricey and not a Dobsonian, but it certainly gets you close:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaZmf8ecWOw

That is pretty hard to get planetary stuff like that, you even snagged the weather bands on jupiter /and/ the moons.  Nice!  

Yeah! I was readjusting the tripod every few seconds to keep the planets in the center of the frame!

My main target has been Andromeda, but the last few times I've used my CLS filter, and what's happened is that I lose any blues/whites, and am pretty much left with nothing but reds!

Here's a screen grab of what I mean:

Azryael said:

Yeah! I was readjusting the tripod every few seconds to keep the planets in the center of the frame!

My main target has been Andromeda, but the last few times I've used my CLS filter, and what's happened is that I lose any blues/whites, and am pretty much left with nothing but reds!

Here's a screen grab of what I mean:

I'm not famliar with the method on color calibration in PS but likely one could do a manual color calibration in something like pixinsight.  I can relate to the red stuff, I use a baader glass filter on my camera so inherently all of my raws are super red.

That's odd that the one star at the bottom and majority of the light on andromeda are fine but the rest are ultra red.  Most CLS filters to my knowledge are mostly just made for white light for noise pollution, I've not seen them affect the color like that. 

Yeah, this is after trying both a manual method, as well as the automated calibration in PixInsight. I get the same result in PS or PI, it's so weird.

I've even tried the star color calibration that's supposed to color the stars as they truly are using the database, but the colors don't change. Just all stays red!

I need to set up a means of sharing the stacked photo with you. I wonder if you could get more out of it. I had taken 60, 3-minute subs, and 19 of them were junk, but that's still 41, 3-min subs. I also did dark flats for this set too.

The stacked results and my processing attempts are nearly identical whether I'm using PixInsight to stack, or DSS. There's clearly something I must be doing wrong!

Weather looks good for tonight. Even with the moon, I may try my hand at Andromeda some more. I dropped down to 2-minute subs the other night, but couldn't get enough data, so I'm going to stick with it, same ISO and aperture, and see what I can do.

It's getting to be time to upgrade my PC, too. With all the stuff I'm doing for work, and now even more image processing and stacking, my little quad-core 2600K just can't keep up anymore, even if it is chugging along with a 4.7GHz overclock.

I'm stuck in the cheap seats for now.  Best lens I have is the 70-300 f5.6 that came with my D3200 bundle.

I did get some decent star shots a couple years ago.  60 seconds meant I had to stay pretty wide or risk big blurries.

In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :

That's pretty good! I've never been able to really capture much of the milky way, mainly due to the fact that back then I didn't understand the concept of stacking, or the need for guiding for long exposures. I did find that the rule of 500 (or 600) often helped when determining how long I can expose for based off the focal length of my optic, but even at 50mm on the crop body I was usually limited to about 8 seconds before trailing would become apparent. Even stacking 8-second exposures really didn't do much for me.

Light pollution has gotten worse at my house since I first started, and the direction of the milky way itself is toward the even brighter light pollution of San Antonio.

I can't seem to find my shutter remote, so shooting may be off tonight.

Here's a shot I took a while back, unfortunately, I can tell I'm out of focus! I processed it a little more than the one I posted earlier. Really need to get a scope with a bahtinov mask or something, I tried my hardest. I used this as a test print for my new printer to also be able to "hold" my work in my hand, and lack of focus aside, it's still a photo I'm very proud of!

Weather hasn't been cooperative lately, and much of my time has been spent recovering from the recent snow storm that did quite a bit of damage here at home and at work.

We ended up with the Orion XT8 plus, which we ordered back in the beginning of December.  It just arrived about two weeks ago, just in time for single digit temps and double digit winds here in CT, or decent temps and clouds...   Tonight looks REALLY promising though, so I'm hoping to get outside and see something!

In reply to WonkoTheSane (FS) :

Are you looking at snapping photos, or just to observe?

Nice work, guys!  Amazing photographs!