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My first real attempt at astrophotography
Hi all,
Firstly, I am spewing we missed seeing anything of the eclipse today from cloudy Sydney. Watched it live on the net though and it was amazing! Hope plenty of people got great shots that made the trip up to Cairns!
This is my first real attempt at astrophotography. Previously I was taking star trails and time lapse videos. But now that I have my NEQ6Pro mount I got my first real chance to use it last Saturday night (10/11/12). I was very close to heading out to Wiruna for the night but the dodgy weather stopped me from going. Plus the fact that it was my true first time at using the NEQ6Pro since I purchased it. I figured I should get some experience with it under my belt at home rather than in the field.
Anyway after doing hours and hours and even more hours of research on lights, flats, darks, biases, etc. I finally managed to produce and process this image. I had several attempts at reprocessing this image during the week and only now am I happy with the result. Taken from my light polluted unit in Newington where I contend with ANZ Stadium and the various other arenas at Olympic Park. Plus the shipping depot which shines 6 flood lights right at my balcony all night long!
I had massive gradient problems even though I had darks, flats and bias shots applied. I think it might be the way I took the flats using a lamp up close to the lens covered with a t-shirt. Not exactly the best choice.
Anyway I lot of processing went into this shot, feathering and also cloning went into this to make the background uniformly black. Because of the cloning tool, some of the fainter stars at the bottom of the image are false but it’s the best I could do with this shot.
It’s a stack of 100 x 30 second lights, with the same amount of darks, flats and biases. Taken at ISO200. Any higher ISO and the sky became washed out from the light pollution, any longer exposure duration and I get star trails from my crude polar alignment.
To be honest I was stoked that I managed to get the Flame Nebula. But then as I was reprocessing the data more and more I noticed that I even managed to get the Horsehead as well! Really happy with how it turned out. But I really can’t wait to get out to a dark sky and have another go at this.
Shot with an unmodded Canon 60D with a 70-200mm f4L IS lens. Shot at 200mm @ f4.
Any feedback on processing the image would be great! I'd also be more than happy to send the raw stack (stacked in DSS I should add) to anyone who wants to have a go at processing this data.
Cheers,
Jason
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