Sagitta and friends

[Mr niall]

What should have been a quick stress free imaging session has quickly devolved into an absolute nightmare.... I seemed to have made every mistake in the book but have somehow come out with a usable image!

It was my sons birthday party yesterday so I had an hour to get this done before everyone arrived for the party. I set up at twilight and thought I’d get the darks done while I was waiting for it to get properly dark, immediately discovered my intervalometer was broken and the battery for my RDF was dead. Luckily I’m between tracking mounts at the mo, so am using a fixed tripod. This meant that I went all the way down to 18mm to maximise exposure times so the RDF wasn’t vital. Got halfway through the darks then realised I hadn’t set the focal length yet... so started again.

Really struggled to find focus - at 18mm it seems to be a bit trial and error but think I got there, managed to rattle off a pile of manual light frames using the self timer and then some flats before everyone arrived. Refocusing to get shots of the houses was another palaver using bike lights and re focussing and moving and refocusing again. Also discovered another textbook error with taking darks first - all the darks were taken at ISO1600 but even at only 20 seconds light pollution destroyed the image so had to step down to 800 for the lights.

Had a chance to work on it today, DSS got really upset with it, seems the edge distortions of the lens or something else was causing star trails that’s weren’t there in the subs, and the very very edge of a tree was destroying the right hand fifth of the image. I must be the only person in history to have actually created star trails through stacking when there were none to start with. Anyway, stacked about 6 times changing settings each time and eventually it worked. Buts the flats didn’t... ended up with something that looked like looking through a snowy Christmas window with the biggest reverse vignette I’ve ever seen. No idea what happened there! So just abandoned the flats.

Processing was fun but turns out it’s a surprisingly painful and time consuming process to merge two images but the magic wand tool makes it reasonably manageable, definitely something to revisit. One thing I did learn is that I have a truly horrific gradient pointing toward the south, so I think I need to keep my images as near the zenith as possible, so that’s useful to know!

Anyway, enjoy!

Canon Eos 1300d, 18-55 kit lens at 18mm. ISO 800 / 1600...

30x 20 secs

15 x darks

15x flats (not used)

2x 30sec for the foreground.

DSS / PS

 

[Beulah]

I can see the Coathanger!

[JamesF]

31 minutes ago, Beulah said:

I can see the Coathanger!

It's quite obvious there, isn't it?

James