First Widefield with a GEM

[Ohan Smit]

Good day

After having great seeing(3-4) on Friday, I tried an experiment with my D800 and Nikkor AF-S 24-70mm @ 70mm on the Advanced VX, on Friday night to see what kind of results I can expect.

This was a 37 x 60 second exposure, shot at ISO 200 and a aperture of f/2.8, without any bias,flats or dark frames.

All shot from my porch, with a yellow HPS streetlight 4m away and orange zone light pollution.

Nikon D800 in astrophotography mode.

Cropped off the extreme edges to remove the worse of the vignette, resulting in a 30 megapixel image.

Combined(Star Aligned) in PixInsight, Integration Method : Median

Basic Image Processing done in PixInsight, resulting in a well toned flat image saved as 16-bit tiff without an associated alpha channel.

Tonemapped Single Image in Nik HDR Efex.

Filtered with Nik Color Efex in Photoshop.

Output sharpened.

Kind Regards

Johannes

[robbie c]

That's a cracking image for your first widefield you must be very happy well done

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[Ohan Smit]

That's a cracking image for your first widefield you must be very happy well done

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Thanks

Yes, I am indeed impressed with the results obtained from the 24-70mm zoom lens, so impressed that i went online and bought a second hand Nikkor AF-S 300mm f/4D IF-ED, but moments ago and now I had to sneak it into the house without my partner spotting it

tisk tisk...

[Pete Presland]

Plenty of objects in that field of view, very nicely done!

[Mrbloke]

Amazing image. Hmmm, looks like I will have to get the camera out and try some myself!

[xtreemchaos]

very nice image mate,you must be well pleased"i would be". thanks for sharing..charl..

[MartinFransson]

Thanks

Yes, I am indeed impressed with the results obtained from the 24-70mm zoom lens, so impressed that i went online and bought a second hand Nikkor AF-S 300mm f/4D IF-ED, but moments ago and now I had to sneak it into the house without my partner spotting it

tisk tisk...

That combination is going to rock! I use a Canon 300/4 and the results are great (by my standards). Granted good tracking of course

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[Ohan Smit]

That combination is going to rock! I use a Canon 300/4 and the results are great (by my standards). Granted good tracking of course

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The combination did indeed rock for my first light with that 300mm/f4 lens, you are welcome to have a look.

But as usual this lens has now summoned cloudy nights for the foreseeable future.

Regards

Ohan 

[MartinFransson]

Great photo! Imagine that with a few hours of exposure!

You could also try it with a teleconverter/extender. I use mine with a 1.4x making it 420mm f/5.6. Still reasonably short exposure times with that.

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[Ohan Smit]

Great photo! Imagine that with a few hours of exposure!

You could also try it with a teleconverter/extender. I use mine with a 1.4x making it 420mm f/5.6. Still reasonably short exposure times with that.

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Thanks you

Yes indeed I can only imagine what 5 mins subs would look like once taken over a span of hours, I am still a  under 1 hour sequence virgin.

Once the weather clears, I am going to setup my newly found 300mm X-bar, so then I would have some use for the 80mm f/7.5 Guidescope I have, which I cannot use atm with my OTA since my mounts capacity is a mere 30lbs(I do however have a 50mm finderguider for the OTA).

So the  80mm Guidescope + the 300mm f/4 lens and camera would be way under the 2/3rds capacity for imaging, and I can do longer sub exposures than my current unguided 40 second widefields.

Will report back once I have some results to post

Regards

Ohan

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Superb first wide-field on a GEM