You don't need a telescope

My favorite spot to shoot from. Just up the road from my place is the Peddler Hill Scenic Overlook. It's @ 7,000' in the Sierras just south of Lake Tahoe on Highway 88.(Amador County, Ca.) No city lights for 50-75 miles and blocked by mountains.
This my shot that's is on Google Earth/Panoramio. You can enlarge it to pixels. It was shot with a 7D & 10-22mm. I used my LED headlamp to light the foreground.
The orange glow on the horizon is the approaching sunrise.
http://www.panoramio.c​om …er=date_desc&us​er=4600445

loved going through these pictures . good work guys and gals!

Canon 60Da, 400mm F5.6 lens, Astrotrac Mount.
42 shots of 1 minute each at F6.3 ISO1600

luigis wrote in post #15476828
Canon 60Da, 400mm F5.6 lens, Astrotrac Mount.
42 shots of 1 minute each at F6.3 ISO1600

...

No telescope involved!

Holy #$@@&^. That is fan-effing-tastic! I knew the 400 f/5.6 was a good lens for astro, but that is just totally over the top!

There are some amazing images in this thread.

This is the best I've got so far, I'm new to astrophotography (new to photography as a whole)

Orion Nebula
Canon 600D, 70-200 f2.8 & 1.4x | 5x 2sec, ISO6400 & 3200 mix, stacked in cs6

Canon 550d, Sigma 70-300mm, 8:40 min exposure.

5135 x 3303

EMBED PREVENTED, IMAGE TOO LARGE: http://img802.imagesha​ck.us/img802/7813/orio​n4.jpg Click here to see our image rules.

Fantastic result Luigis, very impressive. I wonder how much better the 60Da is at such work than the conventional bodies?

luigis wrote in post #15476828
Canon 60Da, 400mm F5.6 lens, Astrotrac Mount.
42 shots of 1 minute each at F6.3 ISO1600

No telescope involved!

Ok...you've convinced me that I need to get an Astro Trac or some kind of autoguider! Great pic!

luigis wrote in post #15476828
Canon 60Da, 400mm F5.6 lens, Astrotrac Mount.
42 shots of 1 minute each at F6.3 ISO1600

No telescope involved!

Now there's proof! Outstanding work Luigis, the warm dust tones are fantastic. You captured a lot of faint detail with only 42 minutes and relatively short sub exposures. Very well done.

Luigis..Beautiful shot!! Could you give some hints and/or links as to the postprocessing?

luigis wrote in post #15476828
Canon 60Da, 400mm F5.6 lens, Astrotrac Mount.
42 shots of 1 minute each at F6.3 ISO1600

No telescope involved!

Could you post one of your subs, so we can see how much light were getting in each one?

Thank you for the comments really appreciated! The Astrotrac is a GREAT piece of equipment for astrophotography without a telescope. Not needing to carry a notebook or a guiding setup is a pleasure (to me).

Madweasel wrote in post #15478184
Fantastic result Luigis, very impressive. I wonder how much better the 60Da is at such work than the conventional bodies?

The 60Da is more sensitive to the red and near-IR part of the spectrum so it gets more light from red and near-red nebulas.

Steve M wrote in post #15482755
Luigis..Beautiful shot!! Could you give some hints and/or links as to the postprocessing?

Yes, sure!
I have a strange worflow. I don't stack RAWs. I develop my RAW files using DXO optics so I setup white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, noise reduction, etc and then batch convert all the RAWs to 16 bit TIFFs.
Then I stack-align the TIFFs (with DeepSkyStacker or similar).
And I process the final stacked shot with Photoshop.
I'm not using dark frames, flats, etc.

archer1960 wrote in post #15482957
Could you post one of your subs, so we can see how much light were getting in each one?

Here's a single sub without any processing at all, just RAW=>JPG conversion with all defaults in DXO.

That's interesting Lugis. Would you mind posting an example of the TIFF that you feed to DSS ?
It's always interesting to hear different approaches to solving the same problem.
How do you polar align your Astrotrac ?

luigis wrote in post #15492063
Thank you for the comments really appreciated! The Astrotrac is a GREAT piece of equipment for astrophotography without a telescope. Not needing to carry a notebook or a guiding setup is a pleasure (to me).

The 60Da is more sensitive to the red and near-IR part of the spectrum so it gets more light from red and near-red nebulas.

Yes, sure!
I have a strange worflow. I don't stack RAWs. I develop my RAW files using DXO optics so I setup white balance, exposure, contrast, saturation, noise reduction, etc and then batch convert all the RAWs to 16 bit TIFFs.
Then I stack-align the TIFFs (with DeepSkyStacker or similar).
And I process the final stacked shot with Photoshop.
I'm not using dark frames, flats, etc.

Here's a single sub without any processing at all, just RAW=>JPG conversion with all defaults in DXO.

...

Stacking several shots reduces the noise and then you can stretch the histogram without destroying the information.

Thanks for posting the single sub; it's pretty much what I expected. I have shot the HH with my unmodified T1i, but the result wasn't nearly as nice as yours, and I needed about 4 minute exposures to get what you were getting in 1 min. Probably mostly due to the different filter in front of the sensor, so you're getting much more in the deep red part of the spectrum.

SteveInNZ wrote in post #15492164
That's interesting Lugis. Would you mind posting an example of the TIFF that you feed to DSS ?
It's always interesting to hear different approaches to solving the same problem.
How do you polar align your Astrotrac ?

To Align the AT I use another strange method. First I align the mount and the camera using any bright star or planet, I center the star in the AT polarscope and also in the camera.

Then I do a rough align and start taking 1-5 minutes exposures (depends on the lens) and check if the star trails are centered in the camera, if not I make a correction and repeat. Since the camera and the Mount were previously aligned when the trails are dead center in the camera the mount is pointing exactly to the celestial pole.

I live in the South Hemisphere so no Polaris here.