Astronomy

[EJG1980]

Cheers. It's a million miles away (or should I say light years away?) from the kind of photos you see people submitting to shows like Stargazing Live, but hopefully I will move in that direction, baby step by baby step. If I can end up getting a shot even half as good as most of the amateur astrophotos you around the web, I'll be very very happy.

[MartyG]

The problem you're going to struggle with is the chroma-noise, difficult to avoid when you're running 30 second exposures, especially at ISO 3200+. In this respect, film cameras are often a better bet for this type of photography.

[EJG1980]

On some of those shots I didn't really need such a high ISO setting, I was messing around and experimenting a lot. That shot of the Orion nebula was only ISO 800 (although I think one of the Pleiades shots was at 6400 ).

I'm looking into trying my hand at image stacking, once I've read a bit more about it, and combining multiple exposures at much lower ISO levels. Probably 99% of all the good looking astronomy photos I've seen are stacked, sometimes with shots taken over more than one night! I'll start a bit smaller though, stacking 20-30 shots and seeing what I end up with.

I also bought a set of actions for Photoshop Elements, designed specifically to help with astrophotography (removing colour gradients, reducing the effects of light pollution, noise reduction, etc.) so hopefully they should help me clean up the photos a bit more too.

Gonna be a long and slow process to get anything good though

[Charlie]

Love that shot on Venus, did you tinker with in any way? Maybe one day you'll be as good as The Sky at Night's Pete Lawrence.

[EJG1980]

No fiddling with it in photoshop other than really basic stuff like slightly adjusting the contrast, it's pretty much "as shot". The really prominent spikes of light come from setting the lens to a small aperture.

[Charlie]

No colour filters/enhancement? Looks really blue.

[EJG1980]

Doh, yes, I changed the white balance in the camera as a quick and dirty way to get rid of the orange glow from the street lights, which has made things look more blue.

I was still technically right though, as I didn't change the colour in photoshop, that's how it came out of the camera

[Rossco]

Wow beautiful images! I'm deffo getting a scope with a mount to track objects and take photos now. Seems almost pointless otherwise.

[EJG1980]

If you're interested in the photography side of things definitely go for an equatorial mount straight away. I was a wimp and thought it looked a bit too complicated, so went for a simpler altazimuth mount when I got my first telescope. False economy though as I've ended up buying an equatorial mount in the end anyway, so I could have saved a bit of money if I'd just gone for one from the start. They're not very hard to use once you've got the hang of them either.

Hope I don't have to wait all week for clear skies again, I wanna get back out there and practice and take some more pics!

[Dogg Thang]

I realise it's $200,000 but the fact that there is a genuine website with a booking form for space flights really says to me we're finally getting futuristic. Hopefully in ten or twenty years we'll be telling stories to our space-jetting kids about those early price tags. http://www.virgingalactic.com/booking/

[EJG1980]

"You're complaining that it costs you ?20 return to get to the Moon? Pah! In my day, we had to walk 240,000 miles, in the snow, uphill, to get to the Moon! Bloody kids these days."

My favourite space photo is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo (where every single thing you see in the photo is actually an entire galaxy) and they've now made a 3D version of it, which is pretty cool:

[Charlie]

Cool is right. Good video.

[EJG1980]

Clear skies for the first time this week so I had another stab at the Orion Nebula. Still a mile away from the kind of stuff I drool over on astronomy forums, but, a very nice improvement on my first attempt from earlier in this thread!!

Full wide shot


Close up crop on the nebula

[EJG1980]

Got my first look at Saturn of 2012 last night after it moved out from behind the big tree at the end of our garden early enough for me to stay up and have a look

It has reclaimed the crown of being my favourite planet from Jupiter, who was temporarily number one while Saturn was out of sight. It was at a really good angle so you could see the separation between the rings and the planet extremely clearly.

It was the first thing I saw when I first got a telescope, so it'll always be my favourite object in the sky.

[Charlie]

Lovely shots of the Orion Nebula with her beautifully vivid colours.

Can't believe you betrayed Saturn when she was away by favouring Jupiter. How fickle. ;-)