Think of all the photos you may have taken and which was your favorite..either because it signalled a break thru or you took if when your house was on fire..
Maybe an object you never thought you could capture ..a photo with a new scope or a very old one or a new camera...so post your special photo and tell us about its significance in your astrophotography journey.
My favorite is now over ten years old..it is a widefield.
I practiced for two weeks to pull it all together and produce this image...getting good polar alignment took me most of those two week leading up to this photo..I had my mount pulled down by a mate and fiddled with..I cancelled playing pool that night☺ and manually guided the camera via a 150 reflector scope with an illuminated reticle for one hour and twenty minutes to get it all in one single capture..no stacking can you believe it☺...one hour twenty minutes glued to the eye piece... I nearly went crazy.
I took widefields every night for two week leading up to build up to this night..new Moon...so everything would work.
So that is why this image is special to me..I have done better I guess but nothing makes them as special as this...so please post something you are proud of and share with us the circumstances.
From best as I remember it was a canon 300 d ( 6 meg) and the standard canon lens that came with the camera and I think 400 iso althought it may have been 100 iso.
I presume from the shutter time and the fact it was taken 10 years ago, that the image was captured on good old fashioned film.
There is something captivating about a good widefield image, guess it reminds us of being out under a dark starry sky and just taking it all in.
Jeff it was a canon dslr..the canon 300 d was the first dslr to get digital astrophotgraphy off the ground...up till then you could buy expensive astro cameras but the canon really started it all I would say..prior to that a few of us would use web cams or the gutz from a small didigal camera. .some web cams could do long exposures but none of mine...but they were only of use for Moon shots really...The canon 300 d started it all in my view.
I was just about to try film..I had the t ring and shutter release. ..the canon cost a little over $2k and a one gig memory cost $110 from my recollection.
I did post this photo here back in 2015 and found it was still on photo bucket..I just looked now and it is still there.
Here is a link and there are a couple there still.http://s77.photobucket.com/albums/j6...=xelasnave.jpg
It was rathet flash in its day and even then my time at the eye piece was really a long spell. ..more than most ...maybe Raymo can boast houts at the eye piece with film but not me.
I think I did take a roll but never developed it cause the canon came my way...it was a gift from my wonderful father.
Alex
What no favorites.
I awoke expecting to ne presented with interesting photos and stories and yet not a one...
I guess everyone is busy eating easter eggs.
Alex
Great thread Alex, I'm looking forward to what people might post and the stories behind it.
This is my favourite so far. I've only been imaging for a bit over a year now so my favourite is going to far from the quality of others and it is. This M42 I took earlier this year. Up until Christmas all of my imaging was on a Nexstar Alt-Az mount which I could only get 22 sec subs reliably. What a difference when I could run for minutes. ( unguided at the time ). It was a whole new learning curve and I'd also just received my first Astro modified camera. For me this image marks the biggest leap forward so far for me.
My favourite would be from late 2015 or early 2016, about half a year after starting astro. I didn't like eyepieces, so got an LN300 video camera and starting live stacking onto a small 7" screen with my 8" SCT with a meade reducer. Unfortunately I have no images from then as I wasn't using a computer.
Soon after that I got an ASI224MC. This was one of my first, live stacked and stretched images 31x 5sec (no darks, flats) using some beta version of sharpcap from April that year. You can tell I didn't know how to polar align at all, but heck I was proud of it.
This would be my favourite photo so far, an 18 panel mosaic of the Milky Way. It was supposed to be a 36 panel but I input the wrong coordinates for the panels further out on either side.
It was taken over two nights with a Nikon D7200 and Sigma Art 85mm. Although it hasn’t been my largest mosaic or my deepest image or my highest resolution it just shows so much of the central bulge of the Milky Way.
This would be my favourite photo so far, an 18 panel mosaic of the Milky Way. It was supposed to be a 36 panel but I input the wrong coordinates for the panels further out on either side.
It was taken over two nights with a Nikon D7200 and Sigma Art 85mm. Although it hasn’t been my largest mosaic or my deepest image or my highest resolution it just shows so much of the central bulge of the Milky Way.
Thanks for contributting here Colin I for one greatly appreciate you doing so.
What a magnificent image.
I love it I would love that printed up to wallpaper one wall or maybe the ceiling.
Fantastic thanks so much for adding to the thread.
Alex
I wish I had my very first wide field...I did not even know you had to focus the camera and the shot had stars about 2mm diameter. .I had no idea but I was so proud of it ... and does anyone here remember Astronomy Daily? That site disappeared never to resurface...but I posted it there as pleased as punch and I dont think anyone mentioned my focus was out...but as I said that one got me so excited I was hooked on widefield.
Alex
Well I'm going to have to post 2 images......one being a reference, one being the meaningful one.
The first NGC 253 is an early image of mine and to be honest, at the time I was pretty stoked having got it.
The second pic is one I took further on in my astro journey and it was the picture that I went 'wow', these countless hours spent freezing in the shed are starting to pay off!
By no means am I saying I am an expert astrophotographer but I was very pleased with this one and it spurred me on to keep learning and refining my skills.
Thanks Jon for contributing and we can have more than one favorite ..heck if you have five kids what are you going to do..have only one favorite.
And both wonderful images to boot...
So lets extend this to your favorite three deep sky shots, and your favorite planet shots and your favorite solar shots as well as widefields, the International Space Station comets and aroras..not to forget total or partial eclispses or planet transits of the Sun...but only three of each..well maybe four of each.. no three..well ten is good..its always the "ten of" thing...the ten worst plane crashes etc..the ten commandments..so ten is good ... in the interest of creativity lets keep it open post as many as you like...
But not less than one.
Keep them coming in ..just look at what the morning has produced...so if you have not been able to image for a while post now.
Alex
First one
I had just received my new astro cam (1600) and filters, and my friend Simon was hosting a star party at his place, so I think the day or 2 before I actually got the filters and filter wheel! So this was sort of the first light for me... I arrived on the beautiful property, with a few other people imaging there, with little chickens and dogs and everything running around! So I set up, we eat, and back outside, to be met with possibly the most beautiful dark skies I had seen! I began my first LRGB sequence, I had some trouble with focus but eventually worked that out, started lum, blue subs all good, green ok, at this point it was maybe 12 am, I was sitting with Simon freezing my butt off! We saw some beautiful meteors and things, also observing with some binos, great fun! Then my mount decides to slew randomly, I was super mad because I only had one night to get this pic! Well I get that fixed after a lot of time, start capturing red frames, and then the dew rolled in, but I was happy to have gotten enough data for an image. The next day I open the lum frames, and stretch them... WOW! They were spectacular! When I got home I eventually processed them, which was fun, and at the time I lived the pic, now I look back at it and while it's not the best technically at all, I love the story behind it as that was one of the best imaging sessions I had had. I want to revisit that neb some day, only a dark sky does it justice!
The next one is probably my technical favourite image, but it doesn't have an interesting backstory , but I feel the colour is unique and the stars are mostly under control. It's the statue of liberty (NGC 3324 I think)
Thanks Alex for a wonderful thread, happy Easter!
Wow. Loving the images and the stories behind them. I’ve only been doing proper astrophotography for about 6 months and during the most consistently warm summer I can recall as well. So having to constantly battle massive amounts of thermal noise while learning to get the best from my system at the same time has been a tough learning curve. I’ll admit many of the images I’ve taken, even at the 4-6 hour mark have left me wondering whether I should just risk divorce and go for a cooled mono camera haha. But after belt modding my mount and adding temperature compensating auto focus even with warm nights dithering and good focus have drastically improved my images.
This brings me to my favourite image, which happens to be my most recent. NGC 6188 the Fighting Dragons of Ara. No sleep all night for 3.5 hours of Ha data as I also images the Tarantula. It was about lunchtime the next day when PixInsight finished the Bayer drizzle integration and when I extracted the red channel and auto stretched oh my goodness! Finally after 6 months I had something that looked great straight from the camera.
I have two favourites, I.C. 2602 which is a bit minimalist, but for some unknown reason I really like. I seem to remember that it was quite well received when I originally posted it. [The full res version is nicer].
The Moon, which was my first digital eyepiece projection single frame.
Alex, love your wide field, such dedication, and no, you have me beat.
To the best of my recollection an hour was as long as I went, with ASA 25 film.
Lovely shots here, can't comment on them all, especially with most likely more to come, just enjoy.
raymo
First one
I had just received my new astro cam (1600) and filters, and my friend Simon was hosting a star party at his place, so I think the day or 2 before I actually got the filters and filter wheel! So this was sort of the first light for me... I arrived on the beautiful property, with a few other people imaging there, with little chickens and dogs and everything running around! So I set up, we eat, and back outside, to be met with possibly the most beautiful dark skies I had seen! I began my first LRGB sequence, I had some trouble with focus but eventually worked that out, started lum, blue subs all good, green ok, at this point it was maybe 12 am, I was sitting with Simon freezing my butt off! We saw some beautiful meteors and things, also observing with some binos, great fun! Then my mount decides to slew randomly, I was super mad because I only had one night to get this pic! Well I get that fixed after a lot of time, start capturing red frames, and then the dew rolled in, but I was happy to have gotten enough data for an image. The next day I open the lum frames, and stretch them... WOW! They were spectacular! When I got home I eventually processed them, which was fun, and at the time I lived the pic, now I look back at it and while it's not the best technically at all, I love the story behind it as that was one of the best imaging sessions I had had. I want to revisit that neb some day, only a dark sky does it justice!
The next one is probably my technical favourite image, but it doesn't have an interesting backstory , but I feel the colour is unique and the stars are mostly under control. It's the statue of liberty (NGC 3324 I think)
Thanks Alex for a wonderful thread, happy Easter!
Very good images there Logan..Is this the first time you have posted them?
I have been thinking using the zwo for widefield and using a canon lens (just the one that came with the camera) I was looking today and Bintel sell an adaptor for about $60 or $70 ...
Please keep your wonderful images coming as it is so wonderful to see a young person such as yourself producing such fine images..I take my hat off to you.
Alex
