Help needed please...

[JonnyT]

Hi all,

I'm new to the forum and very new to night sky imaging. I've already introduced myself over on the "Welcome" section so I'm gonna repeat myself a little here, apologies.

My friend and I are taking our first baby-steps into night sky photography so I'm here for all the help I can get.

We're just starting out so our equipment is very basic, but I'm sure the more we get into this the more we will upgrade over time.

 

Currently our set up consists of:

Home-made Motorised Barn Door Tracker (my friend is an engineer)

Canon 1100D with an 18-55mm Lens

Laptop with BackyardEOS

 

We took everything out for it's first test-drive last week and the tracker works really well. Even on very long exposures the stars remain as points and not trails so we were really pleased with how it performed.

I've attached what was probably our most successful picture of the evening. It' not amazing, but it's a start and we were both pretty happy with it for our first go.

 

I would really love to get some photos of the Milky Way in all its glory, and I'm hoping you all could suggest some settings to use, imaging techniques to try out, equipment upgrades, editing etc?

We're on a bit of a budget but we have photographer friends from whom we can beg and borrow equipment.

Any and all help and tips greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Jonny

[toxic]

the only suggestion i can give you with the stuff you have is to make sure your hinge on the barn door tracker is pointing at polaris so you will be able to track for longer and no more the 10 seconds at 18mm or you will start to get star trails allso you will be able to use the 1100d at iso 3200 without to much noise and dont forget to take darks - flats - and bias frames to calibrate the noise and vigneting -this will help http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html there are help videos there as well as the free software.

 

[JonCarleton]

One of the keys to astro-photography these days is stacking.  That is, taking loads of images and combining them with stacking software (eg: Deep Sky Stacker (Windows) or Siril (Linux)) to improve the resolution and density of your images.  Stacking software aligns your images and will even allow you to collect images from multiple night sessions on a single target and combine into a single dense image.

Why take multiple images instead of one long time-lapse?  Imagine a two hour time-lapse that had 2 airplanes, 5 satellites and an owl fly through the field of view.  Or perhaps the wind or a glitch in the mount caused some camera shake or clouds invaded during part of the exposure.  Or, or, or...Two hours wasted.  If you take 2 hours of exposures in smaller bits (eg: 5 minutes, or less...or more depending upon the mount) you can eliminate any bad images prior to stacking and still get excellent results...and add more to the stack another night.

Once you have a good final image from stacking what will will amount to many minutes or even hours of data, then post processing is next.  There is a process called "stretching" the image that makes the view of a mundane, but dense, well-stacked image, absolutely spectacular.  This can be done in Photoshop (Windows) or GIMP (Linux) or in other specialized software that will have specialty image tweaking functionality, such as camera noise-reduction and other useful options.

Much of this software is available as freeware/donationware and all of it has a learning curve.  But it is well worth the time and effort to learn.

Collecting multiple images underscores the need for the reliability of your mount.  Collecting data on multiple nights requires precision pointing.  To that end, there is a process called plate solving.  The simplest, (but possibly slowest) method is to take an image, upload it to nova.astrometry.net and wait for the results (up to 10 minutes).  It will tell you the -exact- coordinates of the image, allowing you to make adjustments as required.  You can also download the astrometry data and software and run it locally with speedy results, but that process is beyond the scope of my intent here.

Edited September 24, 2020 by JonCarleton

[happy-kat]

I'm a big fan of barn door trackers and built one here.

If you have an Android phone the app DSLR controller makes focusing easy and you can run a timelapse to take the lights. I've the 1100d and on my camera 3200iso is way noisy, 1600 or 800 work best and a I choose based on the histogram peak being clear of the left edge or upto to a third of the way along. If using the kit lens you'll probably find star shape improves if stopped down a little. I'd make a dew shield for the lens, this will cut stray light and prevent dew forming.

Oh and I find back button focus very handy to leave as the default. Saves from accidently altering focus when imaging. Old m42 lenses work great as fully manual is ideal for imaging and an adaptor is around £10, I've got several I use and the super takumar is great good stars and butter smooth focus.

Edited September 24, 2020 by happy-kat