Hello

This is my first attempt at Pleiades using my Canon G6 on a Cheap £12 Tripod.

A bit about what I am doing. My aim is to discover the night sky and at the same time photograph some of the more well known naked eye sights, such as Pleiades, Orion Nebular etc... using existing equipment I already own. I did not want to blow hundreds or thousands of pounds on equipment and then discover I don’t enjoy cold nights and then give up and waste my money.

I must say a big Thank you to Aha who took the time to reply to one of my earlier posts and introduced me to a free program called iris. This program has changed everything for me. I am just starting to scratch the surface of this programs capability and the results are incredible.

Things I have learnt the slow and cold way. If you use the zoom function on your camera forget exposures of more than 4secs you will get star trails. Also after every 10 shots turn your camera right a bit to compensate for the earths rotation. This enables Iris to align the images easier and you will not get the error message cannot match c1 c27 etc….

Also remember less is more I took 60 shots of Orion’s belt and stacked them all. The Orion nebular just ended up being a huge white blob.

The finial tip is just get out there and experiment, what works for one person may not work for you and vice versa.

To the more experienced people on here could you give some advice on the picture please. I can get a lot more brightness out of the stars but then the black background looks horrible.

Thank you

Kind Regards,

Paul

Attached Images

master_exportcropped resized irfan.jpg (30.9 KB, 101 views)

Not bad!

Practice makes perfect, as they say.

You did very good, just keep on adding to your experiences and before you know it you will have a mastepiece Welldone and Clear Skies

Did you use a telescope or just camera and tripod, if just a camera what size lens did you use? Nice Job, very pretty

Hello,


I used a camera on a tripod with the following settings:

Tv (Shutter Speed) 4
Av (Aperture Value) 3.0
ISO Speed 400
Focal Length 28.8mm
Image Size 3072x2304


I then used iris to stack 34 4sec exposures and played around with dividing, binning gamma etc… to obtain the result in the picture.

Regards,

Paul

Very nice Paul! By the way, if the Orion Nebula is not saturated in each sub-exposure then it should not be saturated in the stack no matter how many subs you take amd stack. Have you read Jim Solomon's Astrophotography Cookbook for IRIS? If not do a search for it - it's free and it's excellent. After registering (lining up) the images you normalise them (using noffset2) and then the stacked result will not be blown. It took me a while to realise that when you stretch the stacked result with the "asinh stretch intensity" command, it's vitally important to experiment with the intensity value for each value of the stretch value to make sure that the brightest part of the image is around the maximum 32767 - you may need to use the visu command to find out where the brightest spot is. To bring out the faint details of an object it is good to use a high value of stretch, like 0.02 whereas for shots of stars you can use 0.005.

clop

Hi Clop,

Thank you, I have read this guide and found it to be really useful. I had the camera setting wrong at 2*2 binning and not ticked for gradient.

Do you know of a good in depth guide to binning?


Regards,
Paul

Sorry dude I don't know anything about binning.

clop