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What should I image first?


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Total amateur about to take my first steps into AP as I have decided to expand my existing landscape photography passion.  I am heading off to the Lake District next week staying at Windermere and am taking my SkyWatcher Star Adventurer Mount and will be using my Sony A6500 cropped camera.  I have a Samyang 12mm f2 lens and the Sony 70-350 zoom lens. I’m like a kid in a candy shop and don’t know what to try first or even what is possible with this rig.  I’ve been reading up on the ‘how to’ and am looking forward to having a go but would welcome some suggestion on what I should try and shoot, assuming clear skies.

 

thanks

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M45 The Pleiades, easy to see and frame in the view finder, 60 second subs so no guiding required. Lovely blue grey nebulae in front of the cluster. Nice object to practice your processing on too.

Hope you have the weather for it👍

 

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8 minutes ago, Andy R said:

M45 The Pleiades, easy to see and frame in the view finder, 60 second subs so no guiding required. Lovely blue grey nebulae in front of the cluster. Nice object to practice your processing on too.

Hope you have the weather for it👍

 

Thanks Andy, would I use the wide angle or the zoom lens to capture that?

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I would kind of think I'd leave M45 until I had a good grasp of things, it was my second or third target for AP. I will probably return to it again as it deserves a second go. M31 remains a first target in my view, only to be returned to once you've perfected things, and found out how to avoid washing it out too much.

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Zoom lens at 200 or 250mm or so, at 350mm you might get star trails without the guiding, with the crop factor you should get a nice full image in your field of view. 

Keep a eye on your focus too. 

That said have a go at the Milky Way early evening with your 12mm

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11 minutes ago, gilesco said:

I would kind of think I'd leave M45 until I had a good grasp of things, it was my second or third target for AP. I will probably return to it again as it deserves a second go. M31 remains a first target in my view, only to be returned to once you've perfected things, and found out how to avoid washing it out too much.

OK, which lens would you recommend I use for M31?  Would this also need 60sec subs?  Always good to have choices.  Thanks

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To play around with focal lengths and deep-sky objects, you could go to telescopius.com -- that will allow you to previsualize what a target will look like for a given sensor size and focal length. Or you can download Stellarium (free), and set it up to do the same thing. Planetarium apps like Stellarium are also great to help you find the objects in the sky, it's available for phones as well as for computers.

For Andromeda, you'll definitely want the long end on the zoom. Here's a screenshot out of Stellarium showing the galaxy and a 300mm focal length on an APS-C sensor.

1668640175_ScreenShot2020-10-29at11_22_44PM.png.cca4b0b3fd0ccc4b9b640f776f30ab4c.png

 

If you get a chance, play around with the mount and your camera beforehand, you'll want to minimize your "fiddle time" in the dark and also should get an idea of what's practical for exposures. For example this is a 500mm lens, APS-C (image is cropped) on a simple camera tracker (iOptron SkyTracker). It won't win Astronomy Picture of The Day but for one of my first ones, I was pretty pleased! These were two-minute exposures on an f/8 mirror lens, so I had to process them with a pretty heavy hand to get the details out of the data.

You will have to focus manually -- your camera will almost certainly refuse to autofocus on a starry sky. Magnify the live view by a bunch and you should be OK.

Note that that image is composed of 19 frames of the same thing, "stacked" using software like Deep Sky Stacker (Photoshop also has a very basic mechanism for doing this via setting the stacking method for a Smart Object). Without going into brain-numbing detail (references available upon request though!), taking a whole bunch of short exposures allows the software to stack up the exposures as if it were one long one. Once you have the images captured, I for one would be delighted to help you through the processing part. 19 two-minute images is actually pretty short, but a total exposure time of half an hour to an hour should let you get something pretty good out of a bright object like M31.

At a shorter focal length, the left end of Orion's Belt has some truly wonderful molecular clouds just jumping with color. Again, this is not anything to submit for prizes, but I did it with a simple 50mm lens on my APS-C camera and an electronic widget that simulates a tracking mount (sorry, only Pentax cameras have it!).

The 12mm should let you get some really stunning images of the Milky Way. The Lonely Speck tutorials on the Milky Way got me started, he has a 5-minute video on learning to shoot the MW, and the Astrophotography 101 series goes into a little more depth.

One last tip, on exposure: Don't be disappointed if what comes up on your camera screen doesn't look like much. You'll need to enhance the contrast pretty hard (stretching), and stacking helps you do that without so much noise. However, do examine the histogram on a test shot. Since most of an astrophoto is dark sky, the biggest peak will be from the sky background. You want that to be somewhere in the range of 1/4 to 1/3 of the way from the left, but at a minimum it should be mostly clear of the left side (not black-clipped).

Welcome, and please don't mind if I'm a little envious. I wish you joy in the journey!

 

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4 hours ago, rickwayne said:

To play around with focal lengths and deep-sky objects, you could go to telescopius.com -- that will allow you to previsualize what a target will look like for a given sensor size and focal length. Or you can download Stellarium (free), and set it up to do the same thing. Planetarium apps like Stellarium are also great to help you find the objects in the sky, it's available for phones as well as for computers.

For Andromeda, you'll definitely want the long end on the zoom. Here's a screenshot out of Stellarium showing the galaxy and a 300mm focal length on an APS-C sensor.

1668640175_ScreenShot2020-10-29at11_22_44PM.png.cca4b0b3fd0ccc4b9b640f776f30ab4c.png

 

If you get a chance, play around with the mount and your camera beforehand, you'll want to minimize your "fiddle time" in the dark and also should get an idea of what's practical for exposures. For example this is a 500mm lens, APS-C (image is cropped) on a simple camera tracker (iOptron SkyTracker). It won't win Astronomy Picture of The Day but for one of my first ones, I was pretty pleased! These were two-minute exposures on an f/8 mirror lens, so I had to process them with a pretty heavy hand to get the details out of the data.

You will have to focus manually -- your camera will almost certainly refuse to autofocus on a starry sky. Magnify the live view by a bunch and you should be OK.

Note that that image is composed of 19 frames of the same thing, "stacked" using software like Deep Sky Stacker (Photoshop also has a very basic mechanism for doing this via setting the stacking method for a Smart Object). Without going into brain-numbing detail (references available upon request though!), taking a whole bunch of short exposures allows the software to stack up the exposures as if it were one long one. Once you have the images captured, I for one would be delighted to help you through the processing part. 19 two-minute images is actually pretty short, but a total exposure time of half an hour to an hour should let you get something pretty good out of a bright object like M31.

At a shorter focal length, the left end of Orion's Belt has some truly wonderful molecular clouds just jumping with color. Again, this is not anything to submit for prizes, but I did it with a simple 50mm lens on my APS-C camera and an electronic widget that simulates a tracking mount (sorry, only Pentax cameras have it!).

The 12mm should let you get some really stunning images of the Milky Way. The Lonely Speck tutorials on the Milky Way got me started, he has a 5-minute video on learning to shoot the MW, and the Astrophotography 101 series goes into a little more depth.

One last tip, on exposure: Don't be disappointed if what comes up on your camera screen doesn't look like much. You'll need to enhance the contrast pretty hard (stretching), and stacking helps you do that without so much noise. However, do examine the histogram on a test shot. Since most of an astrophoto is dark sky, the biggest peak will be from the sky background. You want that to be somewhere in the range of 1/4 to 1/3 of the way from the left, but at a minimum it should be mostly clear of the left side (not black-clipped).

Welcome, and please don't mind if I'm a little envious. I wish you joy in the journey!

 

Thanks so much for this detailed response.  Stellarium download is on my to do list, I saw a blog that demonstrated how to use it to visualise the shot so will do that today.  I’ve also been watching loads of tutorials on processing, though it better to know what I was getting into before I got into it haha.  Have also purchased Digital SLE Astrophotography by Michael Covington, a little light holiday reading.  I’m keeping my expectations low as to what I see in the viewfinder, funnily enough, I’m not too worried about the techie bit and the processing, just finding the right spot to point at!  Appreciate your offer of help with processing and will be sure to reach out if I get stuck, either way, will post the resulting image.  Thanks again

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1 minute ago, Karen Johnson said:

 I’m keeping my expectations low as to what I see in the viewfinder

M31 was my first target, and the night went awful - it was freezing January - I was just unable to get my guiding to work, and in the end I just pointed the scope at M31 and took a bunch of 30s exposures without guiding, hoping that tracking was in the right place. Then I packed up my kit, and went to bed, thinking that I was just in over my head on all this stuff and I would never get things working.

I looked at the exposures the next day, and didn't really have any idea of what to do, and couldn't really get anything out of them.

Near the end of winter, I went to the Astrofest in London, and spoke briefly with one of the exhibitors who was demo'ing AstroPixelProcessor (APP). So when I got home I gave the free-trial a go. The result is still awful, but I was really proud of it at the time, and it's my first astro photo, so I keep it around:

1923885924_Andromeda2020-01-19.jpg.e32d0c72d9a0d527db2e8256ab4b67fd.jpg

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10 hours ago, happy-kat said:

You'll best item will be a means to remote trigger your camera, either onboard time lapse or intervalometer or similar.

Thanks, I have a Pluto trigger which should do the job,mit doubles up as an interval omelet amongst other things but if that doesn’t work I can let the Star Adventurer control the camera and trigger it.

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10 hours ago, gilesco said:

M31 was my first target, and the night went awful - it was freezing January - I was just unable to get my guiding to work, and in the end I just pointed the scope at M31 and took a bunch of 30s exposures without guiding, hoping that tracking was in the right place. Then I packed up my kit, and went to bed, thinking that I was just in over my head on all this stuff and I would never get things working.

I looked at the exposures the next day, and didn't really have any idea of what to do, and couldn't really get anything out of them.

Near the end of winter, I went to the Astrofest in London, and spoke briefly with one of the exhibitors who was demo'ing AstroPixelProcessor (APP). So when I got home I gave the free-trial a go. The result is still awful, but I was really proud of it at the time, and it's my first astro photo, so I keep it around:

1923885924_Andromeda2020-01-19.jpg.e32d0c72d9a0d527db2e8256ab4b67fd.jpg

If I manage anything like that I will be over the moon!    I don’t have guiding capability, am starting simple so I will also be doing the ‘point and shoot’ and letting the Star Adventurer to track.  I’m going to download DSS and stack my images in that (she said knowingly) and then process in Photoshop.  Have a book, watched tutorials, how hard can it be?  I’m kidding, I know it will be a challenge for me but I do love a challenge!

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38 minutes ago, Karen Johnson said:

If I manage anything like that I will be over the moon!    I don’t have guiding capability, am starting simple so I will also be doing the ‘point and shoot’ and letting the Star Adventurer to track.  I’m going to download DSS and stack my images in that (she said knowingly) and then process in Photoshop.  Have a book, watched tutorials, how hard can it be?  I’m kidding, I know it will be a challenge for me but I do love a challenge!

If you go slowly and take care, then you will end up with something with more potential than mine. Even if you don't every outing is part of the learning, and your next result will be better than the last.

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13 hours ago, happy-kat said:

Stargazine episode 18 video could be useful to watch, have a look in the StargaZine folder.

Thanks, I shall take a look though sadly, the holiday is on hold, woke up to the Covid news this morning and the potential national lockdown, just my luck!

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Awwww! We're also going back to the days of buying the stores out of toilet paper here in Wisconsin. Trips are pretty much a no-go (so to speak). Although outdoor activities are way up, you basically can't find a used kayak or bicycle in Madison. The premier local paddle shop says his business is up 30% over last year.

So sorry the trip is on hold, but just think how much more ready you'll be to do astro by the time you go! And please do say hello to the Lake District for me, my wife and I spent a goodly chunk of our honeymoon there and it is still one of my favorite memories, all these decades later.

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