Bluesboystig

Hi everyone, Together with a friend we had a go at trying to shoot the North America nebula, completely untracked. We made so many mistakes it's unreal 1000 x 1s lights (no darks, bias, flats, because.. I don't know why..), with a Nikon d810 at 50mm. Now, with hindsight, we could have pushed probably much longer exposure times, but we were worried about star trailing. So I think that the final result is a consequence of having not a lot of exposure time per each frame after all. It's all part of learning, but I'm beating myself up so much, we could have used the night much better. I have tried my best with GIMP but I can't get much more out of the stacked file. Not sure if you have any tips/hints? Cheers! Simone

Just bagged my first two objects ever, and I'm chuckling like a kid! I managed to find the Beehive Cluster in Cancer (it looked sooooooo awesome) and Melotte 111 in Coma Berenice. I need to learn my way around the sky properly, can't wait for more!

Thanks everyone, nice to feel welcome! I'm near Binfield, so not too far away really! The binoculars should arrive today, very excited. I'll play around in the garden and then in case start trying some spots nearby. Veri excited

Hi all, recently moved out of the big smoke to Bracknell. I've just bought my first pair of binoculars as a way back into staring at the night sky before dumping all my savings on new expensive toys I read there are a fair amount of people from nearby so it would be great to catch up and meet others, i.e. squeeze every drop of knowledge out of their brain Looking for some suggestions about decent enough sites to go to (needle in a hay stack I suppose...) Thanks and hopefully catch you soon! Simone

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give it a go! hopefully my laptop will survive the experience of stacking a shed-load of exposures Image processing is definitely something I need to learn quickly..

Hi everyone, I have been geeking out on astrophotography for so long that I lost track of time. A couple of weeks ago I managed to grab a friend of mine Nikon D800 with a 24mm and head somewhere darker than inner London. The idea was taking many untracked exposures of the milky way and then stack and process them. First time trying to do any of this. I guess you will laugh at the attempt, but as a first try I'm not too disappointed. This was built from 20 exposures at ISO 1600. The problem is the diffused brightness over the horizon that "kills" a lot of the interesting portion of the frame, and I don't know how to solve that problem. I'm on a Mac, so I used Siril for the stacking and Gimp for the processing (surprise surprise, never done any photo processing in my life before. Should I try and stack more exposures (I have probably around 150) to see if more useful data can be extracted or that will increase the noise too much? However, some cool stuff is visible anyway, I can see the Lagoon nebula, the Swan and the Eagle nebulae. Any tips and suggestions, comments, even just for a laugh, are welcome. The road ahead is very long and with a steep learning curve, but hopefully soon I'll get my hands over a tracker and a small refractor Thanks for taking the time to read what a total noob had to write and dark skies to everyone!