Astrophotography

Marcus, I am an admirer of astrophotography. Actually more of a star gazer myself, hoping to catch a glimpse of some UFO's any day now. I also like looking under a microscope and did a little photography under the lens.

I saw your website and what an awesome camera setup you have along with some very cool photographs.

A very awesome field, just the other day I was thinking about getting some night vision goggles to do some star gazing, strictly hobby for me but I find it all so fascinating.

I do some, but not on the same scale you're doing not having access to a telescope to mount on. The Horsehead Nebula is very impressive. Stuff like this.

I love it, but, having had access to public presentations at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, which is down the road from me, I know that I'm outclassed and will never have a camera THAT good.

I dabble a lil bit.

I dabble as well although I don't have a telescope (yet) so I'll be content with shooting the Milky Way until then ;) It's something I'd definitely like to try at some point though, a friend of mine has a whole setup for deep space imaging and he'e does some amazing stuff.

Trying to learn deep space and planetary imaging. It is a lot different than land based photography. I'm finding it's quite a learning curve and sometime a bit frustrating. But I might get there eventually.

The Nikon D810A is built for Astro. I don’t do enough of it to buy the camera. There is a lot of reallyyyyy cool tools of both hardware and software one can buy if you want to go down the Astro rabbit hole. Now if only my wife would agree.

This is as close as I've gotten to astrophotography. It's something that I'd like to get better at, but it's not the type of thing you can just walk out your door or drive down the street to do. Living in Toronto, the closest place I could find that's far enough out of the city to not be polluted by light is about two hours away.

I've read a bunch about DeepSkyStacker, and how you should have a variety of dark shots (i.e. taken at the same settings as you plan to actually shoot with, but with the lens cap on) as well as "normal" shots in order to help reduce noise. For this type of thing, unless you want LONG exposures, you'd need a wide open lens, like maybe f1.8. I only have one lens (it says it's an f3.5-6.3, but for whatever reason it never seems to want to go below f5.6), so that complicates things. Based on an exposure calculator site I found, a 2-minute exposure at f1.8, ISO 800 would require a 21-minute exposure at the same ISO but f5.6; with the recommendations I've read suggesting a minimum of 15 dark shots, that's over 5 hours worth of shooting before you even "shoot" anything. Or it suggests a 3-minute exposure at f5.6, but at ISO 6400. That may work with all the dark shots, since they're designed to reduce the noise, although I'm usually hesitant to raise the ISO that much.

Anyway, as Bob says, it's a lot different than land based photography. I've only been to a dark sky preserve once, so I haven't really had much of a chance to try out anything I've read about it yet. One day, though.

There is a piece of gear that will track the constellation or whatever heavenly body you are shooting as you shoot it which will avoid star trails.
You can then stack exposures in whatever software you are using. The reason you stack hi iso exposures is to reduce the effect of noise and hot pixels. A stack of 4 1600 iso exposures gives you an effective iso of 400 iso. Kinda neat. You want to limit your exposure times to avoid hot pixels. As your sensor temperature rises your hot pixel count increases a lotttttt.

We know so much of how the universe looks, we can imagine and create and hopefully sell our out of our world imagery. I have a few in my fantasy and fiction collection, i love imagining what goes on up there, deep in outer space.

I enjoy photographing the milky way and star trails. I haven't concerned myself with deep space photography till now although I like that kind of photos as well.

"Wow" amazing images everyone love astrophotography.

My summer 2000 quarantine project:



I was planning to release a blog article on how this was done... I guess I should finish it! As someone mentioned, the most critical investment for this is a star tracking device.

I've dabbled a little bit with some night sky/milky way shots, and I shoot the moon sometimes. I haven't really done anything that would be considered astro photography that I've been happy enough with to add to my portfolio just yet.

Astronomy has always fascinated me. I used to (a lone time ago) have a nice telescope and also had a graduate course in astronomy - even learned how to operate the planetarium at a major university near our home. However, I do not have any real astrophoto equipment and no longer even have a telescope. But I do like images of the night sky. So I have a few with moonlight and have even done some other night shots.



But next up will be star trails. My Olympus camera has a feature to define start trails on one exposure - over a length of time. I am looking forward to some dark winter nights.

I normally do quite a lot of night and astrophotography (though not as much in last couple of years as I used to) and have a whole gallery of images. Southern Hemisphere night skies are fantastic and it's relatively easy to find superb high altitude locations with virtually no light pollution, low humidity and usually not many other photographers

I really enjoy this thread. I’ve only just started and don’t get out too often but this is my favorite so far. I find that my images aren’t as bright so I’d love to get any tips.

I'm working on it but have yet to get to a really good dark zone. Tried Joshua Tree twice, there is just to much light coming from Palm Springs. I'll keep trying

If you've got a minute or two, a little more than two years ago I got Pluto with nothing more than a regular 200mm telephoto lens and a 10-year old DSLR (bought used off eBay), using a tracking mount on a tripod and 30 second exposures. See the animated GIF time-lapse movie at https://VISNS.NeoCities.org/VISNS_movies/index.html .

The tracker is the only piece of equipment I have that otherwise wouldn't be in my bag of photo gear. I think they cost around $250 now. I also have a 3-D geared tripod head that I find indispensable for a lot of work.