Processing Milky Way from DSLR

[Kon]

Hi,

I have taken a few Milky Way pics with my Nikon D3200 18-55mm lens. I am a complete novice. I tried iso 1600 and 3200 and 20s exposure. I tried to play with levels in GIMP but the results are not the best. Any suggestions or ideas?

 

Thanks

 

 

Edited October 9, 2020 by Kon
remove duplicate pic

[Budgie1]

I'm not expert on this, but hopefully I can give some pointer.

There is a lot of noise in that image (the purple/blue in the background) so I assume this is one of the ISO 3200 images? Also, if you zoom in, the stars are just starting to move. So try ISO 800 or 1600 to reduce the noise and 15 second exposures to reduce the star trailing and take lots of images at these settings, I meant 20 or 30 of them, maybe more if you have time.

Then you can download them onto a laptop/PC and use some free software called DeepSkyStacker to "stack" all the images on top of each other and improve the final result. Say you take 10 images, instead of having one 15 second exposure, when they are stacked together it's the equivalent of a 2 and half minute exposure. So the more images you can stack, the better the final image will be.

You will need something like GIMP or Photoshop to process the final image and get the best out it and there are plenty of tutorials about this on here and on the likes of YouTube.

Hope that helps.

[Kon]

21 hours ago, Budgie1 said:

I'm not expert on this, but hopefully I can give some pointer.

There is a lot of noise in that image (the purple/blue in the background) so I assume this is one of the ISO 3200 images? Also, if you zoom in, the stars are just starting to move. So try ISO 800 or 1600 to reduce the noise and 15 second exposures to reduce the star trailing and take lots of images at these settings, I meant 20 or 30 of them, maybe more if you have time.

Then you can download them onto a laptop/PC and use some free software called DeepSkyStacker to "stack" all the images on top of each other and improve the final result. Say you take 10 images, instead of having one 15 second exposure, when they are stacked together it's the equivalent of a 2 and half minute exposure. So the more images you can stack, the better the final image will be.

You will need something like GIMP or Photoshop to process the final image and get the best out it and there are plenty of tutorials about this on here and on the likes of YouTube.

Hope that helps.

Thank you for taking the time to look at the image and helpful suggestions. Once the skies clear a bit I will try your tips.