Very first attempt at astrophoto - Milky Way

[Bluesboystig]

Hi everyone, I have been geeking out on astrophotography for so long that I lost track of time. A couple of weeks ago I managed to grab a friend of mine Nikon D800 with a 24mm and head somewhere darker than inner London.

The idea was taking many untracked exposures of the milky way and then stack and process them. First time trying to do any of this.

I guess you will laugh at the attempt, but as a first try I'm not too disappointed. This was built from 20 exposures at ISO 1600. The problem is the diffused brightness over the horizon that "kills" a lot of the interesting portion of the frame, and I don't know how to solve that problem. I'm on a Mac, so I used Siril for the stacking and Gimp for the processing (surprise surprise, never done any photo processing in my life before. Should I try and stack more exposures (I have probably around 150) to see if more useful data can be extracted or that will increase the noise too much?

However, some cool stuff is visible anyway, I can see the Lagoon nebula, the Swan and the Eagle nebulae. Any tips and suggestions, comments, even just for a laugh, are welcome. The road ahead is very long and with a steep learning curve, but hopefully soon I'll get my hands over a tracker and a small refractor  Thanks for taking the time to read what a total noob had to write and dark skies to everyone! 

Edited July 30, 2021 by Bluesboystig
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[AstroMuni]

14 hours ago, Bluesboystig said:

Should I try and stack more exposures (I have probably around 150) to see if more useful data can be extracted or that will increase the noise too much?

Nice image. The more the number of images stacked, the better your signal to noise ratio should be. So give it a shot !

14 hours ago, Bluesboystig said:

The problem is the diffused brightness over the horizon that "kills" a lot of the interesting portion of the frame, and I don't know how to solve that problem

You could try cropping the image to cut off the brighter sky and then work on stretching it. The other option would be to use layers in Gimp to split the bottom half of the image into a seperate layer and stretching each layer individually.

Edited July 28, 2021 by AstroMuni

[Bluesboystig]

24 minutes ago, AstroMuni said:

Nice image. The more the number of images stacked, the better your signal to noise ratio should be. So give it a shot !

You could try cropping the image to cut off the brighter sky and then work on stretching it. The other option would be to use layers in Gimp to split the bottom half of the image into a seperate layer and stretching each layer individually.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give it a go! hopefully my laptop will survive the experience of stacking a shed-load of exposures  

Image processing is definitely something I need to learn quickly..