My 1st post. So amazed by this type of photography. A few questions please

[Catanonia]

Guys and Gals.

I have been lurking this section for a few weeks now and am absolutely amazed by some the pictures taken and posted here. I have always been into astro type pursuits and just had to give it a go now that I have my proper tripod.

So my equipment is

Sony A700 (sorry)
50mm Prime
500mm Zoom
Good tripod.


I noticed that even a 10second exposure with a 500mm zoomed in would give star trails. I was amazed they moved so much and I can see how the magnification makes this worse.

So I need to learn to stack I suppose.


So here is my 1st shot and an very bad edit of it by myself and hence I need some pointers so I can make some serious attempts.

So the first picture is the raw converted to JPG of some random area of the Sky. UK based point South West.

The second shot is my basic attempts at processing this single image.

It was shot with F1.4 50mm prime for 9 seconds at ISO 400


Ok questions if you don't mind helping me out.

What would be the best ISO to use with F1.4 50mm ?

How long shot I expose for at this setting ?

How do you set white balance up for these shots. I know how with portait shots etc, but this is new.

Is the purple tint on the pictures due to light noise from the nearby city (50km away) ?

What tips would you give for post processing. I know PS quite well ?

What stacking programs (free) would you recommend ?

On one frame I got a perfectly straight line (streak). I assume this is a shooting star or metorite or a satelite ?

Can someone edit the 1st JPG for me to give best results and post the basic steps they did please to get me started ?

Many thanks for any help, I am really excited about all this and am even looking at telescopes.

Many thanks

Cat

[troypiggo]

...

It was shot with F1.4 50mm prime for 9 seconds at ISO 400

Ok questions if you don't mind helping me out.

What would be the best ISO to use with F1.4 50mm ?

How long shot I expose for at this setting ?

How do you set white balance up for these shots. I know how with portait shots etc, but this is new.

Is the purple tint on the pictures due to light noise from the nearby city (50km away) ?

What tips would you give for post processing. I know PS quite well ?

What stacking programs (free) would you recommend ?

On one frame I got a perfectly straight line (streak). I assume this is a shooting star or metorite or a satelite ?

Can someone edit the 1st JPG for me to give best results and post the basic steps they did please to get me started ?

Many thanks for any help, I am really excited about all this and am even looking at telescopes.

Many thanks

Cat

I think at 50mm you might be able to push the exposure out to 20secs, 30 might be too long and get some trailing. Try experimenting with that.

ISO - you might have to bump it up to ISO 800, even 1600 or so.

I'd stop the lens down from f/1.4 around 2 stops for sharpness as most lenses aren't sharpest wide open.

The purple bg might be your white balance thrown off by light pollution? Typically I think LP is an orange sort of colour.

I use curves and just play with those to bring out the most. Keep in mind that night sky bg is not perfectly black, so try not to clip the histogram at the dark end.

Stacking software - start with Deep Sky Stacker. Free and fairly simple to use.

Straight lines could be satellite, meteor, plane, iridium flare - depends on if it's constant, dashed line, short or long etc. You might have to post the pic for more experienced eyes than mine to help.

Your posted image also has some vignetting, darker around the edges. Look at the DSS site on "how can I improve..." or something like that. They talk about darks, flats etc. Flats will get rid of that vignetting. Darks get rid of hot pixels. And many frames stacked increases the signal to noise ratio.

[chris.bailey]

What he said.

At 50mm you should be able to get 30 second subs without trailing as long as you dont point up too much. Make sure your tripod etc is well grounded and if you have mirror lockup then use it. There are signs of some shake on your sub.

Deep sky stacker is a fantastic program. I also own Maxim but still use DSS for stacking.

Purple tint is almost certainly a white balance issue. Easily fixed in PS. Shoot and Stack RAW.

[Catanonia]

Cheers guys.

Been doing much much more reading and downloading.

Got hold of Deep Space Stacker and it is a nice program. I did some 8 second subs that night too with a dark sub to and stacker worked nice, shame I had trails at the time due to inexperience.

I am going to have another go tonight if the clouds stay away. Going to try serveral types of things.

1. 50mm stacks of 10 seconds for wide angles at about F2. Will try iso800.

2. 500mm stacks of 5 seconds focusing on Vega. See what I get :)


Can anyone in the UK suggest a nice target for me to pick to try and get some colours. I have Stellarium to help me out with mapping the sky.

Many thanks for the help

Cat

[ebann]

Enjoy this...

http://www.pbase.com/samirkharusi/beginners

[Catanonia]

Enjoy this...

http://www.pbase.com/samirkharusi/beginners

cheers mate, one of the links I have all ready read and was excellent learning :)

[ebann]

The more light gathering ability, the better. Thus definitely try ISO 800/1600 especially when doing short exposure of a few seconds. When doing minute-long exposures (5-10min) you lower the ISO a bit. The noise added from high ISO can be subtracted later on post-processing.

[Catanonia]

I am loving this.

Just done a complete panoramic view of my location for viewing and created a new location for Stellarium all orientated perfectly.

Just identified the star area I was looking at as the constellation of Bootes :) and lit almost perfectly lined up with myu Stellarium picture of my garden :)

[chris.bailey]

Stellarium is a nice orientation programme.

At 50mm I think you could be ok at 10 seconds. Use ISO 800 and stack 30 or 40 of them!

[Catanonia]

How do you guys do a grey sub ?

Need a constant brightness image. I have studio softboxes. I suppose they would work, but big and awkward. How do you guys do it ?

[Nighthound]

Welcome to the challenging world of astrophotography.

I've never subtracted a dark or light frame but I have read that using a white t-shirt stretched flat and evenly lit will do the trick. Keep in mind that dark frames should be taken at the same time, at the same ISO and ambient temperature as your object sub exposures in order to have the same background noise level and hot pixel count.

Set your white balance to average. Since your exposures are very short I'd suggest the highest ISO your skies and camera will allow. Excessive light pollution/sky glow will begin to take over and make your exposures more difficult to render useable. At the exposure lengths you're talking about and from your examples I doubt you'll have too much problem with that.

Your Photoshop skills will come in handy after you stack your sub exposures. You will need to have a nice touch using curves. Check out Noel Carboni's Astro Tools for Photoshop. They're an excellent set of actions written especially for astro and work extremely well.

[Catanonia]

Welcome to the challenging world of astrophotography.

I've never subtracted a dark or light frame but I have read that using a white t-shirt stretched flat and evenly lit will do the trick. Keep in mind that dark frames should be taken at the same time, at the same ISO and ambient temperature as your object sub exposures in order to have the same background noise level and hot pixel count.

Set your white balance to average. Since your exposures are very short I'd suggest the highest ISO your skies and camera will allow. Excessive light pollution/sky glow will begin to take over and make your exposures more difficult to render useable. At the exposure lengths you're talking about and from your examples I doubt you'll have too much problem with that.

Your Photoshop skills will come in handy after you stack your sub exposures. You will need to have a nice touch using curves. Check out Noel Carboni's Astro Tools for Photoshop. They're an excellent set of actions written especially for astro and work extremely well.


Cheers, for $19 worth a paypal buy :)

Just paid and got it, lets have a play :)

[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

Mate, I offer my help if you would like it. I wrote a few pages on this as a beginner, learning by myself. I found sometimes beginners can explain things in simpler terms before the technical jargon gets ahead of them.

http://www.asignobservatory.com/astrophotography_guide.aspx

If you hover your mouse over the astrophotography buttons on the left side of my page, you will find more techniques and deep sky photography.

Cheers,

Baz.

[Catanonia]

Cheers Baz,

Your has been one of the sites I have been using :) How I worked out stacking and how long to take subs for etc :)

Great Site :)

[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

Awww, good on you mate. I am so glad it could help in some way.

Cheers,

Baz.

[Catanonia]

Well been playing with the only good 5 subs I had from my 1st 1/2 hour ever playing with the stars and a dslr. Very poor data to start with, but learnt alot for next time.

Composed with 5 x 9sec subs at iso 400 on a 50mm prime and 1 dark.

Used a bit of PS and the Carboni tools.

What do you think bearing in mind my 1st attempt and limited subs.

Basically a composition of the 1st shot I took in the 1st post of this thread.

Looks like i captured my 1st satellite too :D

My next attempt will be a 400mm focus on the center of this picture for about 50 subs of 3.2 seconds (preset on my shutter speed in manual mode) at
1600 ISO. Need to do this as currently have no tracking yet.

Apparently according to Stellarium, there are about 6 galaxies in that region I am trying to capture.

[ebann]

Well been playing with the only good 5 subs I had from my 1st 1/2 hour ever playing with the stars and a dslr. Very poor data to start with, but learnt alot for next time.

Composed with 5 x 9sec subs at iso 400 on a 50mm prime and 1 dark.

Used a bit of PS and the Carboni tools.

What do you think bearing in mind my 1st attempt and limited subs.

Basically a composition of the 1st shot I took in the 1st post of this thread.

Looks like i captured my 1st satellite too :D

My next attempt will be a 400mm focus on the center of this picture for about 50 subs of 3.2 seconds (preset on my shutter speed in manual mode) at
1600 ISO. Need to do this as currently have no tracking yet.

Apparently according to Stellarium, there are about 6 galaxies in that region I am trying to capture.

Very nice! Do you live near a city? The sky should be black... try ISO 800... that's twice more light in! Did you use f/1.8 as well?

[Catanonia]

Very nice! Do you live near a city? The sky should be black... try ISO 800... that's twice more light in! Did you use f/1.8 as well?

Major City of Manchester is 40km away and a smaller town of 200,000 about 10km away so a bit of pollution.

That was shot with 5 subs of 9secs at 50mm F1.4 prime. Next work will be 400mm at about F5

[Nighthound]

Nice shot.

Your image is very well color balanced and could maybe move to a slightly darker background but not much. Space is not pure black. If you push it to be pure black you will clip the black point on the histogram(peak will be slammed all the way left). Aim for a balance of R=25, G=25 and B=25 or somewhere very close when you sample the background. That'll put you at good balance and a plenty dark background. Clipping the black point is a sure fire way to toss out very faint detail especially later on when you go deeper and start shooting globular star clusters, galaxies and nebula.

[Catanonia]

WOW.... I just spotted M3 Galaxy cluster on my picture by lining up with Stellarium :)

WAY toooooo cool...... OK that is definately my target for the next clear night. Focus on that area with 400 - 500mm Zoom lens and have loads of short subs. Should get a better picture with 500mm compared to a 50mm Prime.

Also worked out why I have a bit of shake. Forgot to set to 2sec timer which lifts the mirror on the Sony A700. :)

Can anyone confirm I have captured a small M3 please :)

[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

He's hooked.....

[Nighthound]

He's hooked.....

LOL! Yep, no turning back now. Lock up the credit cards. :D

[chris.bailey]

Yep, another victim reeled in!

Your shot is a bit out of focus. Focus is actually one of the most critical and patience testing bits but worth spending time on. The infinity mark on your lens may not be a good indocation of critical focus. I think if you achieved focus you would be able to reveal a few faint fuzzies in that frame.

Dont bother with darks unless you are going to stack lots of them or you will be adding noise.

[Catanonia]

LOL! Yep, no turning back now. Lock up the credit cards. :D


ooops, was out till about 2am last night :)

Yes I guess I am hooked :) Watch out bank manager.

Just sold a load of remote controled aeroplanes and kit so needed a new hobby I could do from home. Wifey works late shifts, so winter time will be great :)

Thanks guys, tis fun if not cold :)

[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

ooops, was out till about 2am last night :)
Ohhhhhh, you've got it baaaad....:lol:

[ebann]

Get your kit lens, set it at 18mm, and shoot a few long exposure of about 30 seconds. You'll be amazed... well probably light pollution would kill the image.

[Adrena1in]

Nice to see you're hooked...wait until you get a high focal length scope and get your first images or views of Saturn or Jupiter...that sort of thing blew me away the first time.

I can't wait for you to see the Andromeda Galaxy...it's MASSIVE!!

[Catanonia]

Nice to see you're hooked...wait until you get a high focal length scope and get your first images or views of Saturn or Jupiter...that sort of thing blew me away the first time.

I can't wait for you to see the Andromeda Galaxy...it's MASSIVE!!

cheers mate, I have 1000mm telephoto lense for my dslr but with no tracking it is useless for anything over 4 - 5 sec exposures.

I have just bought a second hand ED 80 Pro and all need to do is find a good 2nd hand EQ5 or HEQ5 with goto functionality on it so can mount the dslr and the scope.

[A.S.I.G.N. Observatory]

cheers mate, I have 1000mm telephoto lense for my dslr but with no tracking it is useless for anything over 4 - 5 sec exposures.

I have just bought a second hand ED 80 Pro and all need to do is find a good 2nd hand EQ5 or HEQ5 with goto functionality on it so can mount the dslr and the scope.
Great stuff mate. You have picked an excellent setup to get going on some amazing stuff. You won't be disappointed!

Go get em tiger!

Baz.

[Adrena1in]

cheers mate, I have 1000mm telephoto lense for my dslr but with no tracking it is useless for anything over 4 - 5 sec exposures.
It'll be great for shooting the moon and big planets, and you only want short exposures for those anyway. Might be tricky to line up on a target without a mount though.

I got your PM about my EQ5, but can't call at the moment. Do you want me to PM you some details about it first, and give you an idea of what I'd be looking for it?

Tim.

[Catanonia]

It'll be great for shooting the moon and big planets, and you only want short exposures for those anyway. Might be tricky to line up on a target without a mount though.

I got your PM about my EQ5, but can't call at the moment. Do you want me to PM you some details about it first, and give you an idea of what I'd be looking for it?

Tim.

It is ok mate, already sorted my self out :)

Agreed to buy an Motorised EQ5 Equatorial Head with COAA Computer WIN CTC GOTO set up..

See this link :)

http://www.coaa.co.uk/winctc.php


Should hopefully be picking it up this weekend.

So that is a scope and a fully programmable EQ tracking system that being a computer programmer I should have no problem in setting up a series of picture jobs to do. Going to add extension cables to the connections so that I can control it all from the warm house whilst scope / mount / camera are outside taking pictures.

So should be able to set up a couple of jobs. Ie go to Andromeda, track it, take 20 - 10 min subs. Then go to Vega, do the same etc etc. All from the comfort of the sofa with a beer whilst the setup gets on with it and posts the results back to the lappy for viewing :) :)

Thinking about it, I should be able wifi to the lappy in the garden with the scope and control it from my office PC via remote desktop with live view web cam which I already have :)

How cool would that be :)



Might even add a web cam on for live view from the sofa :)