A few photos from this month of going ham at astro, tonight I want to take a stab at stitching photos for the moon so I can stack them and have maximal resolution
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Moon photo is a stack of best 50% of like 330 photos and using 750mm newtonian on a equatorial mount.
Saturn photo is the same 750mm telescope but cropped in and not stacked (didn’t realize how bright Saturn was for such a small object that was my problem with past tries of saturn)
3rd photo is pointed near draco trying to get a meteor earlier in the month, I got a few throughout the month, this one I think was like 3rd best of the meteor photos, this was taken with a old f1.8 50mm lens on my Fujifilm xs10 camera on a normal tripod.
And last picture is Orion of course, with the same lens and tripod, I didn’t realize until trying this one that I had trouble getting images of nebulas with my telescope because even though it is f5 it is still not good enough to surface them very easily without significant stacking to reduce image noise, that is if it even shows up at all.
Nebula are VERY faint (Orion’s is one of the brightest). Stacking is normal.
well see, idk if i just need to stack more or something but even when i would stack like 600 photos together with long exposures i still wouldnt get anything on the telescope even on easier ones that should have been showing up, i did try some filters some other times but didnt really help, i think a significant issue with it is that im in a bortle 8 zone so its hard to get any interesting pictures at all to begin with.
How long are the exposures? A light pollution filter helps.
Bortle 8 is horrible; I’m not sure you’ll be able to do much with that. Maybe around 5-6 you can get something with stacking.
Yeah closest bortle 4 is a two hour drive away haha, I’m not even near a big city but there a bunch of big cities clustered where I am so the light bleed goes far.
I was in a bortle 4 zone like a year or two ago visiting family and I was suprised to find out that you actually need a flashlight to walk around outside at night whereas here in bottle 8 you can see in foresty areas without flashlights and when the full moon is out it is downright bright outside, I’m on the Midwest of the us btw so not even near where you get low amounts of seasonal light shift.
What kind of exposure settings are you using? For shooting nebulae, you need a lot of time on target.
Thanks for showing us your work. As an armchair wannabe astrophotographer without the time, space, money or indeed bortle-ness, I can only view through your lenses, so I really appreciate you posting 👍
If you want to start the easy way you can get a smart scope like a seestar.
Set it up on a tripod, sit back and relax.
They come with pre-installed light pollution filters, so you can catch some glorious emmision nebulae from pretty much anywhere!
Yup. On my wishlist, but I also would like access to sky. Covered balcony in a city doesn’t help. No car at the moment. All push me towards looking at other amateurs’ work and living vicariously until my situation improves.
Well, if it helps I started with (and often still do) using my phone’s camera for landscape astro / milky way shots.
Pretty much any android phone from the last decade has a main camera that can take decent long exposure photos.
If you can save them in RAW format too then you just need a semi-decent sky and some patience!
The moon shot is glorious!
You can get pretty far with stacking bright reflection nebulae and / or galaxies with some stacking and the right settings on your camera.
Made an attempt at mosaicing plus stscking but I don’t think it helped all that much because I was hitting my maximum magnitude of my telescope which was around 3000mm focal length for a 150mm aperture newt
