Celestial sky

[JaYbIrD1969]

My wife and I were lounging in the hot tub last night. It was a very crisp night for early Sept. Just mesmerized by the clarity of the sky. We dried off and she went to bed and I grabbed the camera and set up on the back lawn. I was inspired by Jroovers beautiful milky way shot and started fiddling with long exposures. I thought my best option for a lens was my 18-270, to get as wide of FOV as possible. Only downside is it only goes to f3.5. So my goal was to keep the exposure under 30 seconds and still capture the depth of the milkyway. The only way to accomplish this was with a very high ISO.
I may try it with my f1.8 35mm next time, tho it will really shrink my FOV. Heres the cleanest image of the batch.

 

[jroovers]

Looks great to me, mission accomplished! What body did you use?

Not only will your 35mm give you a reduced field of view, the bigger issue is that you will have to reduce your exposure time compared to 18mm to prevent trailing in the stars. That was my goal with stacking images - shorter exposure times with less trailing leading to a sharper shot, but still bringing out detail in the stars through the stacking process.

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

Looks great to me, mission accomplished! What body did you use?

Not only will your 35mm give you a reduced field of view, the bigger issue is that you will have to reduce your exposure time compared to 18mm to prevent trailing in the stars. That was my goal with stacking images - shorter exposure times with less trailing leading to a sharper shot, but still bringing out detail in the stars through the stacking process.

Thank you! I used my D7000. My thought on using the other lens is its much faster (f1.8) So I could reduce the shutter speed and/or use a lower ISO. I was lucky to even get the treetops with 18mm. The best view of the galaxy was straight up. So the 35mm will definitely eliminate any landmarks, which is unfortunate. But I may be able to catch a more detailed image of the stars.

What program did you use to layer your images? And were all 6 of your images shot with different setting? Thanks

 

[jroovers]

Thank you! I used my D7000. My thought on using the other lens is its much faster (f1.8) So I could reduce the shutter speed and/or use a lower ISO. I was lucky to even get the treetops with 18mm. The best view of the galaxy was straight up. So the 35mm will definitely eliminate any landmarks, which is unfortunate. But I may be able to catch a more detailed image of the stars.

What program did you use to layer your images? And were all 6 of your images shot with different setting? Thanks

The wider aperture will definitely help let more light into the camera, but the longer focal length will reduce the exposure time you can use without noticeable trailing. Definitely worth playing with. I find I get pretty good results with my 30 mm, so you're probably in the same ball park. Anything beyond 20 seconds or so starts to get dicey, although it would be different for FF vs Crop... is the D7000 crop or FF sensor?

For my milky way shot, I took three shots of the lower portion of the sky, and 3 of the upper... all with identical settings. For each set of three shots, I used CS5 "scripts" -> "stack images". I did a bit of a curves adjustment to bring out the stars a bit on each stack, using identical tweaking on both images. Once I did that and created two stacked images, I stitched them together using photomerge in CS5. I then exported to LR3 and did some noise reduction there (I am not very good with NR in CS5). There is probably a better way to do this, but that is the route I went.

I've looked at Deep Sky Stacker, and thought of trying it out (I think its free), but it is only supposed to work well for images that are star/sky only without foreground subjects. Might be worth a look though. There seems to be a lot of good info on the Canon forum for celestial shooting, which would be beneficial to all photographers regardless of brand of body.

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

Good info! Thank you! I was definitely pushing the limit of exposure length and star trails. Hopefully tonight will give me another shot.

Heres an image from last night that I think may be better than the other. A close inspection does show star trails, but the overall comp isnt too bad.

 

[jroovers]

Good info! Thank you! I was definitely pushing the limit of exposure length and star trails. Hopefully tonight will give me another shot.

Heres an image from last night that I think may be better than the other. A close inspection does show star trails, but the overall comp isnt too bad.

Looks great to me, I prefer this image over the first you posted. Amazing what the sensor will capture! :thumbsup: Make sure to post tonight's attempt tomorrow!

 

[COReefermadness]

more pics!!!