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Astrophotography using HDR?


TimBarber

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I was wondering if anybody had any thoughts or experience using HDR for Astrophotography?

I'm looking at getting a decent image of the Milky Way and the moon and i was wondering if anybody thought this technique may help and also if anybody had tried it and could show an example?

I have used the HDR technique many times to photograph my passion for Urban Exploration. In this field i combine 3-9 exposures in photomatix to capture the complete tonal range of the scene.

My Urban Exploration is here if anybody is interested

https://www.flickr.com/photos/123958148@N05/

Any comments for the use of this technique for astrophotography would be very much appreciated.

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I very often shoot two different exposures for e.g. Moon and stars but I just compositit manually in Photoshop. The differences in exposure are far away from 1-2 stop HDR difference. Like 1/800 f/8 for the moon vs. 30sec f/4 for the stars. For deep sky images I tend to process as an HDR using layers/masks again in Photoshop. This time will start with the same data and stretch it differently on different layers and the mask the unwanted parts of each layer to give the final look. I often stretch a layer, hide the lot with a mask and then use the brush tool on the mask to pick out the exact areas I want to emphasise. Actually I use that adjustment layer /masking technique a lot. One of the toughest things for photographers to realise is that Astrophotography is not 'taking a picture'. It is data collection and processing. Still great fun though :)

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I was wondering if anybody had any thoughts or experience using HDR for Astrophotography?

I would argue that almost every deep sky image is an HDR image.  Once you have stacked together many exposures you end with an image whose dynamic range is far too great to display on screen or in print - either the bright parts are burnt out or the faint nebulosity disappears.  This is why processing the image involves operations such as log scaling, curves etc.

Mark

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Depends a bit on the camera, I shoot at 400% dynamic range because my camera has two sets of pixels that are differing sizes. This results in a single image of whatever exposure length I'm on though.

It's common to take exposures at different settings for Jupiter to get planetary detail and the moons.

TSED70Q, iOptron Smart EQ pro, ASI-120MM, Finepix S5 pro.

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Thanks everybody for all your help and input, very much appreciate it. im just struggling with all this to be honest.... i can't work out to do 1 x 30 sec or 10 x 3 sec or 6 x 15 sec and so on...

many thanks

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