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- Alan
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I took advantage of the recent few nights of clear skies around the new moon and got out for 2 nights for astro.
Took my first attempt with the tracker at a deep sky object and shot Andromeda. I went down to Iping forest in the South Downs. I took 38 images tracked using the 70-200 f2.8 and canon 5d mkiv at 200mm, f5, 90 seconds each, ISO 1600. Once I discarded the blurry stars I had 22 images to stack. Added 15 each darks and bias frames.
Stacked in DSS and processed in PS following an astrobackyard tutorial on procesing a deep sky image. I'm quite pleased with the result!!! Some learnings for next time, 1. take a chair!! 2. I'll probably use the crop DSLR to get more reach or maybe use my 120-400 but I will need to tape down the zoom to prevent movement., 3. I'll aim to shoot for longer, this will hopefully be easier as it gets dark earlier, and if I can figure out if a light pollution filter will work for this in west london I can even try from the back garden and warmth of my living room!!!
The next night I made a return to stonehenge and took a mosaic / panorama rather than a single wide shot. I've shot astro panoramas before but using single exposures and I wanted to try and up the game. So I got one of the move shoot move / alyn wallce Z brackets to take a tracked panorama. I took 70mm and 40mm mosaics, it wasn;t as scary as I feared, I'd figured out the angle of view of my lens and my ball head has markings so i could easily manage the overlap. The 70mm I wasn;t happy with, the sky was too uneven, I'm not sure if I didn't have enough overlap or the light pollution and mist was too fuzzy. The 40mm I think I like. The overall mosaic was 16 images taken at 40mm, 40 seconds, f2.8, ISO 4000. The final shot is cropped down from the full 16 so this is probably just over a 3x3 mosaic. I'm tempted to get this printed and the extra detail from the mosaic looks quite good full size. I've just realised I forgot to remove the light trails from the security guards bottom right!!! Ha, I'll work on that.
As I've been working on the mosaic I realise just how many galaxies there are withint eh milky way, I really need to get chance to put the long lens on the tracker into the core area of the milky way!
Andromeda by Alan, on Flickr
Stonehenge mosaic - 40mm by Alan, on Flickr
Took my first attempt with the tracker at a deep sky object and shot Andromeda. I went down to Iping forest in the South Downs. I took 38 images tracked using the 70-200 f2.8 and canon 5d mkiv at 200mm, f5, 90 seconds each, ISO 1600. Once I discarded the blurry stars I had 22 images to stack. Added 15 each darks and bias frames.
Stacked in DSS and processed in PS following an astrobackyard tutorial on procesing a deep sky image. I'm quite pleased with the result!!! Some learnings for next time, 1. take a chair!! 2. I'll probably use the crop DSLR to get more reach or maybe use my 120-400 but I will need to tape down the zoom to prevent movement., 3. I'll aim to shoot for longer, this will hopefully be easier as it gets dark earlier, and if I can figure out if a light pollution filter will work for this in west london I can even try from the back garden and warmth of my living room!!!
The next night I made a return to stonehenge and took a mosaic / panorama rather than a single wide shot. I've shot astro panoramas before but using single exposures and I wanted to try and up the game. So I got one of the move shoot move / alyn wallce Z brackets to take a tracked panorama. I took 70mm and 40mm mosaics, it wasn;t as scary as I feared, I'd figured out the angle of view of my lens and my ball head has markings so i could easily manage the overlap. The 70mm I wasn;t happy with, the sky was too uneven, I'm not sure if I didn't have enough overlap or the light pollution and mist was too fuzzy. The 40mm I think I like. The overall mosaic was 16 images taken at 40mm, 40 seconds, f2.8, ISO 4000. The final shot is cropped down from the full 16 so this is probably just over a 3x3 mosaic. I'm tempted to get this printed and the extra detail from the mosaic looks quite good full size. I've just realised I forgot to remove the light trails from the security guards bottom right!!! Ha, I'll work on that.
As I've been working on the mosaic I realise just how many galaxies there are withint eh milky way, I really need to get chance to put the long lens on the tracker into the core area of the milky way!
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