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FrozenGate by Avery

Why I don't have an Argon Ion laser this month...

KapHn8d

KapHn8d

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May 9, 2013
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I want one... really, I do. In fact, there were a couple of great multilines on LPF this past month that I fully intended to narrow to a purchase. I love that soothing 488nm beam and there is just something special about having a laser that needs me to snuggle it every month... not that it would have to ask. Kidding aside, the money tree isn't as prolific as I'd like and I had to make some choices. The argon will wait, since I've recently become infatuated with photographing the stars. I'm not really good at it yet, but I'm learning... and each time I go out, I get a little better. I thought I'd throw up a couple of my first attempts and see what y'all thought... be gentle.

M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy

M101, The Pinwheel Galaxy

M65 and the Leo Triplet

M81 and M82, Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy

Have a great week, y'all!

/c
 





Wow, awesome shots! I've always loved astronomical photography, but never gave it a try due to the extreme cost of entry. Similarly I love photography but again, no real camera, heh.

When you do feel like taking the plunge it'll be worth your time to give my inbox a ping, I am still (lazily) trying to sell my 70mW 8Line ArIon as a complete plug and play package, and I am not asking very much at all for it.
 
Care to post your setup? I have been wanting to try this but I don't own a telescope or anything and I wonder how expensive it is to start out doing that.

Those pics are fantastic from an amateur perspective. I love the second one. On the first the galaxy looks awesome but the stars seem a little pixelly IMO. Then again...how many light years away are those??? Yeah. That's awesome!
 
Nice photo's Clayton, In no time at all you'll be our resident astronomical photography expert! :)

Just one question, that first photo doesn't look anything at all like an appliance. J/K
I just had to do it before anybody else did.
 
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Those are great, about the best I've ever done is a multi minute exposure on a 50mm lens which quite clearly showed up the nebula in the constellation of Orion. I've never had the patience to do the above as I believe it involves all kind of trickery including a motorised mount to keep the telescope steady and/or digital stacking?
 
Wow..stunning pictures. Please post your setup, we would love to see it :)
Could talk to jayrob, he does astrophotography as well.
 
Looks great to me. I'd have thought they could have been taken by some observatory if I didn't know.

Alan
 
No Sombrero Galaxy (M104) :whistle:
Nice Photos BTW really wish I had that ability One day i will rebuild my grandads old telescope it had a 12 inch mirror.
 
Thanks, y'all. These were shot with a regular DSLR and a telephoto lens. There are a ton of written books as well as online written and video resources that show you the technique, but basically it was done by take multiple long exposures of the same target and then stacking them together in software. Getting into astrophotography can be relatively inexpensive if your expectations are fairly modest... ie. you can stick a cell phone on a telescope eyepiece and snap photos of the solar system objects in the viewfinder. However, if you want to take longer exposures, you have to deal with the fact that we are spinning in space and counteract for the field rotation caused by it. If you don't, the stars will blur and make trails in your image. I suppose that would tie the length of your exposures to the cost of entry into the hobby in a proportional way. In other words, if you image things that allow short exposures, you can get away with less equipment to start. If you want to image things that require longer exposures, you need equipment to track the object while the shutter is open. The single most important thing required is a mount that moves along the right ascension and declination axis as needed to counter the Earth's spin in the field of view - this type of mount is called a German Equatorial Mount. You can find deals on them used, but expect to pay around $1k for a fairly nice new GEM. There is a ton of free software for stacking and stretching the images you take... as well as commercial stuff. The hobby can get expensive quickly and the rabbit hole goes very deep. The quality of mounts, telescopes, filters, autoguiders, TEC cooled CCDs, etc can add up to astronomical numbers if you aren't careful (pun intended). This is a good book to get started. I'm a newbie, but I'd be happy to answer any questions I can...

/c
 
Sounds interesting. Have dabbled in astronomy for years but not a lot of Astrophotography. But I do have a Canon 5Dlll and a 400mm lens. Just need to get a good photo stacking program for Mac.
Great Photos by the way! +Rep
 
Absolutely fantastic pics. I really like the pic of M81. I had always tried to get a good shot of it, but never had anything quite as nice. I use a fork mounted C8, which makes photographing anything that far North quite difficult.

I've always been very impressed with the digital astrophotography. Someday I should get back into astrophotography. All my pics are with emulsion film though I do have 1 pic done digitally. With emulsion film, for every good pic I have, there are about a dozen that didn't turn out! By comparison, the pic I attached of M51 was a 60 minute exposure on hypered film. The darkened area at the lower right is the prism to pick off a star to guide with. 60 minutes with my eye glued to an eyepiece with an illuminated crosshair!

Anyway, for your first attempt, you did a great job!
 

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Thanks... you should be able to get some great photos with your 400mm lens of many DSO targets. It's a common misconception that you need a "really big telescope" to see things like galaxies and nebula. I was blown away when I figured out that Messier 31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is actually several times wider across than the full moon from our perspective... it's just too dim to see all of it in the night sky... so regular camera lenses can get some pretty neat shots of it. There is a YouTube tutorial that is pretty good that I'll link here if I can Google it up real quick...


For the images I posted, even though I was shooting them with a regular DSLR and camera lens, I did have it mounted on a guided equitorial mount to keep the stars from trailing. I think the tutorial video I linked leverages A LOT of sub exposures of shorter duration and the ability of the stacking software to do an alignment of the images. Almost all the shots I linked were around 30 light frames of about 60 seconds or so each (ISO800). I think the Pinwheel Galaxy widefield one was 26 light frames at 170s each (ISO800). There is some trade-off in noise behavior when deciding between fewer longer shots and more shorter shots, but I don't have enough personal experience with it yet to comment.

Cheers!
 
Great shot, DJZ... thanks for sharing it. So far it's been a lot of fun. I just need to get out more and practice!
 
I need to stop visiting this thread. In other news I have a feeling I know what my tax return will be used for. Lol
 
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