Sunday 14 October 2012

Deep sky astrophotography

Enthused by my recent visit to an open evening at Herstmonceux Observatory, yesterday I made an attachment to fix my SLR camera onto a telescope mount, and tried getting a few pics of part of the Milky Way. I pretty much just aligned the mount and point the camera up into the sky, not at anything specific, so I'm pretty pleased with the results! I've produced two versions of the image I got, the first is adjusted to highlight the brighter stars (click it to view full size in Flickr):

Stars in the Milky Way

and this one which brings out the dimmer stars, getting some of the 'cloudy' appearance of the Milky Way:
Part of the Milky Way

For those interested in the technical info:
  • EQ1 telescope mount, polar aligned and with a very basic RA motor drive
  • Nikon D60 with a Sigma lens, at 18mm and F2.8
  • Five 30-second exposures at ISO1600 (I took seven, but two had a plan on them!)
  • DeepSkyStacker software used to process the images, using flat, dark and bias frames.
I'll be trying some different shots over the coming weeks, when time and weather permit...

Mike

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