since getting back into astrophotography this year, i've pretty much been concentrating on saturn and the moon. i haven't given the (new) camera a go at anything else. whilst i have somewhat of a handle on processing planetary images (considering its been a couple of months) i really am at square one on the 'deep space stuff'. to be honest i've read a few articles trying to understand DSS, darks and flats etc. I now think i understand the purpose of darks, although i'm haven't quite got my head around flats. hopefully i get there soon.
i was out checking for aurora activity last night down in flinders vic (didn't eventuate) and decided to give the canon 600d a work out with its standard lens (as opposed to the 12" dob). i had some ok seeing (in that it was dark) when the cloud wasn't around. i actually think i learnt more about how to use the camera settings last night than i have with hours looking at the planets. Noise is now makes a lot more sense to me and im hanging to get back out there with my new found understanding and aim the scope at saturn.
anyway here is scorpius, canon 600d, 25 sec, iso 2500, the picture is unprocessed. I had a crack at DSS (1st time) and i didn't have any luck in it stacking a collection of 10 similar images. I had a play around in photoshop but couldn't really bring out the clouds more without turning space unblack.
cheers
rusty
ps probably go to flickr, the file is so small you cant see anything on here!
Hi Russel,
Good first attempt. What was your focal length and F/number of the aperture you used. I would have expected it to be a bit brighter than that for the ISO used unless you had the aperture stopped down a bit. I would be shooting wide open. I'm guessing this is the standard 18-55mm kit lens. Shoot at 18mm and use F/3.5. I'm not familiar with the 600D but I am guessing that it can go up to 6400 or maybe even 12800 ISO. So I would also be increasing the ISO to 3200. If you use 18mm, to work out the shutter speed, use the 600 Rule. The 600 rule is 600 divided by the TRUE focal length to give the shutter speed before the stars begin to trail too much to be noticeable. The 600D is not a full frame camera so we need to apply a crop factor to get the true focal length. Canon crop factor is times 1.6. So 18mm x 1.6 = 26.8. The 600/28.8= 20.8 seconds (Call it 20 seconds)
Focus looks a little soft. Set up the camera with the above settings and point the camera at the brightest star/planet you can see. Use magnified live view to zoom in on it and manually focus the lens until the star appears as small and tight as possible.
Hope this helps a bit.
Cheers
Greg
thanks for taking time out to respond. you are correct with the lens 18-55. The f stop i used was f5.6 which may explain the darkness. At the time I was playing around with the iso settings and exposure time and more or less forgot the f settings
I could however see quite a bit of noise on the higher iso settings. perhaps this won't be the case with the focal length more open. But i will definitely open it up next time and reduce the exposure time to 20 sec from 25 when at 18mm.
Thanks, it doesn't quite look as bright on flickr or here as it does when I open the original in photoshop, I'll play around with the settings and see if I can brighten it a bit
Peter, as i say im still learning photoshop, but - when i open the file it comes up in a 'camera raw preview' window which is quite easy to use. It doesn't seem to open up with my tif files but just the CR2 files (canon raw files).
I increased the 'exposure' slider and also the 'contrast' and turned down the 'blacks' slider. the other options i didn't touch too much. I believe you can get to all these options under the 'image' tab and the options to the right of screen. although I am not sure where the 'blacks' and white sliders can be found here. They don't come up with the same options in the normal editing screen ...
The footage was taken in a fairly dark site, i tried the methods on another milky way image i took with more light pollution - it worked, but not as well.
I have PS, too, but haven't got my head around it much. the GUI is quite overwhelming because I don't know what all the stuff means.
I tested Deep Sky Stacker recently - you know, with flats and darks and stuff?
Once the images are stacked, you are presented with a very basic adjustment window for the output.
That's where I understood what can be achieved by only aligning the color curves and then moving the 1 RGB column back and forth on the luminance curve.
Not that I think your last version would have gained anything from that -
just describing how a fellow noob has benefited from a simple GUI.
The photo library software "Aperture" (only for mac) is also very simple in the selection and presentation of image adjustments options.
I just need to follow the possible adjustment options from top to bottom as a post-processing workflow. Easy as.
If you ever come across such a top-to-bottom basic workflow for PS, could you post it here?
and im hanging to get back out there with my new found understanding and aim the scope at saturn.
