Orion Nebula

[Chazs]

I finally finished my barn door tracker and gave it a whirl last night. This shot is a 35 second single exposure with a 200mm lens on a 20D. I tried a 120 second exposure, but I need to work on my tracking some more. Also, if you look at down at the bottom left you can see a geosynchronous (or nearly so) satellite streak. Neat stuff.

[dewmuw]

Wow - neat stuff indeed.


"There is physics and the rest is stamp collecting"

[es839145]

Congratulations to this astronomical picture. It's quite a work to have the tracking properly aligned. The good thing is that with a digital camera you can try again and again and you see the improved results immediately.
I did my first digital asto shot neary three years ago:
http://www.pbase.com/image/1814256

[AFCop]

Cool shot! The tracking can be a bit tricky and it doesn't take much to throw it off. You really have to get your celestial pole sighting as close to spot on as possible, or that'll throw everything else off. BTW, what ISO did you shoot at. I usually shoot at 400 to keep the noise to a minimum. That requires longer exposures, 3-5 minutes, but you can pull in a lot more light that way too. Anyhow, keep shooting and posting them here. Love to see this stuff!


P.S. I'm working on a motor drive for my tracker. A homemade rig that's not very pretty, but if it works right, it'll save me the hassle of tracking!

[Chazs]

Thanks everyone. Hopefully we'll have clear skies this weekend. Maybe the birthday fairy will bring some new toys to try out also. :)

BTW, what ISO did you shoot at. I usually shoot at 400 to keep the noise to a minimum. That requires longer exposures, 3-5 minutes, but you can pull in a lot more light that way too. Anyhow,

P.S. I'm working on a motor drive for my tracker. A homemade rig that's not very pretty, but if it works right, it'll save me the hassle of tracking!

This shot was at 1600ISO (F4 I think). A tried from 400 to 3200 (H). The 800 and 1600 gave the best results, but with noise removal software even the 3200 is useable.

Yeah, tracking is a little bit of a hassle. I recorded a 23 minute Beethoven symphony and overlaid it with a quiet click-track that gives me a click every 5 seconds - hear a click:turn 30-degrees. The music takes the monotony out of it, and I don't have to stare at a watch. I may end up putting a motor on it eventually, but right now I still need to tune-up the tracker, let alone figure out more about the 20D. On that note, I found that mirror lock-up very useful, but the built-in noise reduction was worthless. Still need to play with it a little more.

CHUCK