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.
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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 thoughLast edited by EJG1980; 20-02-2012, 10:51.
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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!
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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/
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"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:
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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.
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