Night sky at 200 ISO

I am in south England for this week and I took advantage of the darker skies as my relative lives on the outskirts of the city. The following is a 200 ISO image at 13 seconds on 53mm. There was a stack of 30, but DSS didn't like some of them and just did it with 24.

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Hang on...you're in the South of England from Wales and you're taking advantage of the dark skies?! I've looked at Dark Sky Maps and thought how great it would be to live in Wales. (Though that depends where you are of course!)

Nice shots, really helps getting away from the big cities and towns.

In Wales, I am in the middle of the town and do not get to see the south or east sky due to the street lights. Also, since I don't have a garden, I am having to do the astrophotos from the bedroom window which I open. Also up here, sunset at the moment is just before 10pm and it is around midnight when the sky is dark enough.

In the south of England, I am on the suburbs of a large town and have a garden that I can use and get dark skies earlier.

If you took these with the same lens (I assume an 18-55), there is about a 1.5 f-stop difference due to the focal length. Combined with the 1 f-stop difference due to the ISO, you have about a 2.5 f-stop difference in the exposures, which is why the second one is so much lighter and shows many more stars.

Adding more frames won't capture more stars, but will increase the signal to noise ratio, allowing you to stretch the results more after stacking.

The red light pollution is a fact of life for most of us, don't let it scare you. It can be neutralized in post processing without disturbing the color balance of the rest of the image. In Photoshop, use the Levels tool to carefully raise the black point of the red channel, and perhaps a little bit on the blue channel as well - it depends on the nature of your light pollution.

That second shot looks quite promising. If you don't have another appropriate lens, I would stick to the wide end of the 18-55 to keep the f-ratio down, until/unless you gain the ability to track and thus remove the necessity to keep the exposure times short. The shorter focal lengths will also allow for longer exposures without the stars trailing - you might try going up to 20-30 seconds or so at 18mm.

Keep it up!

Don

Thanks for the tip. The following was a few days ago on ISO 400. I will try the same, but with ISO 200.

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Hi They are very nice captures with you of the stars.Mark

I think I have finally managed to get something much more presentable. I discovered something called Auto tone in Photoshop and that seems to be able to remove most of the light pollution. It may not be as good as doing things manually, but it sure makes it quicker and easier. The following is a stack of 20 photos (originally 24), ISO 200 and 25 seconds each; so, a total time of 8 min 20 seconds. It was at 18mm and thus f/3.5.

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welshboy wrote in post #10374675
Hi They are very nice captures with you of the stars.Mark

Thanks for the comments. It is possible to do them yourself, you just need dark skies and things are much easier. Where I am, unfortunately DeepSkyStacker complains that there are not enough stars and thus I get bad photos.

The lone looks great. I know what you are up against and the shot works. I like the artistic feel of the tree. This is a result of the stack.

I also like the tree, it looks like it has been painted on with brush strokes, reminds me of one of the famous artists. The next door neighbour had their light on till about 12:20am, hence the light in the tree. I think there may have been some movement when taking some of the photos, hence why the stacking did not work so well on the lower right. I have another photo that I took of Cassiopeia that I am happy with, especially with how many stars appeared. I can't even find where it is on the photo.

http://www.flickr.com …dieuk/471258325​4/sizes/l/

That was taken with the camera on a baking tray with a loo roll under the front of the baking tray. I forgot part of the tripod.