Getting settled into the hobby.

[scross86]

Good morning all,

 

My first post here, hopefully not my last :). Picked up astrophotography with the Lunar Eclipse last year, although didn't have any of the right kit at the time. Since I was a kid I have enjoyed astronomy but got away from it for quite a while. I have two little ones now and I thought it might be fun for the kids to see what I can take photos of (our 3 year old daughter already knows Saturn has rings, Mars is red, and Jupiter has the great red spot). Since moving away from a point and shoot that I couldn't manually focus to the Canon T5i that I own now I have slowly been improving my pictures. My current setup now includes the T5i, 50mm Canon STM f1.8 lens, red intensifier filter (minor help with light pollution), hood for the lens, amazon basics tripod and a cheap-o intervalometer. I have been using Deep Sky Stacker and for stacking and recently picked up On1 Photo 10 (lightroom-ish equivalent) to touch up the photos. All of my sessions so far have been standing off my back deck, South facing to Winnipeg (population 700,000 and you'd swear everyone owns a flashlight :P). By my eyes I am limited to about a 3.5 Magnitude light star to see its there. It's all been fixed tripod shots for now to learn the basics and keep setup time to a minimum. My best sub setup has been a 3.2 second shot, ISO 3200 and a total of 90 shots (I keep the best 90% when stacking). I have not been using calibration frames but for the darks, I have been shooting in single digit temps, so its almost like a subfreezing cooled CCD setup for free :P... minus the heating bill.

 

The targets were Hyades, Pleiades, Orion Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy.

 

Glad to be in a community of people who also decided they get far too much sleep at night and needed a hobby to sort that out.

[scross86]

[scross86]

[happy-kat]

Welcome

You got  some pleasing images there. It's amazing what the camera can see over what our eyes don't. 

[laudropb]

Very nice set of images. Welcome aboard.

[wimvb]

Welcome. I like your Andromeda, it has a nice core and dustlanes.