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Old 18-04-2017, 03:01 PM
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sil (Steve)
Not even a speck of dust

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Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Canberra
Posts: 1,474
Chris, get yourself a planisphere (plastic wheely thing) to help you get oriented correctly with the sky, Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas to help you navigate around and star hop to a target, and jump onto nova.astrometry.net Where you can upload a jpeg photo of the stars and it will plate solve it for you hopefully. It doesnt take much practice to get familiar with a few constellations, they move slowly so if you go outside tonight at 8pm and find a distinctive group of stars, then go out tomorrow at 8pm it'll be in almost the precise same spot, ditto night after etc but over say a month you'l notice those same stars in a different part of the sky but in 12months time they will circle around the celestial poles to return to where they are tonight for the same 8pm time.

its amazing how little you need to get started in astrophotography and mostly mine is all from a regular tripod. Colourful nebulosity shows up with only a second or two exposure time with a dslr that you cant see with the naked eye. I use various tools for planning my astrophotography, I sometimes just do what you did, go outside, point the camera at a patch of sky and shoot, then I'll take do some simple levels boosting to bring up the dark areas. Interesting nebulosity often stands out even if it looks small in the shot, upload the shot to the astrometry site and it'll solve the image so you can see what "things" are in the shot. So for example you might want to try starting with finding a distinctive group of stars, maybe draw them onto a piece of paper for reference the following night (and it aides memory retention) no use a wide angle lens on your dslr (say 50mm) and point it at the same stars, experiment with a few shots at different shutter speeds from 1 - 30sec so you can compare how the stars streak and what you capture changes (this gives you an idea of camera settings for next shots which should be easy if you are already familiar with the Exposure Triangle from photography). After looking closely at your shots and the plate solution you might decide something at the edge of the shot you want to rephotograph with a longer lens. So using the distinctive stars as your starting guides you can work out and estimate where the interesting feature is in the sky and use that to line up your longer lens on it. Take a test shot at longer exposure just so you can look on camera and hopefully see your target in the middle of the shot. Then you get your camera to the best settings to take a bunch of photos and download DeepSkyStacker (free) and start stacking shots and climbing the processing mountain. Rinse and repeat until you've covered the entire sky and upgraded to a private Hubble along the way. Then do it all again to compare changes, its a hobby with no fixed rules or end goals.. at the center of a black hole you'll find it full of astronomers caught by the bug, welcome to the club
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