Here is our latest attempt at a wide field of Crux, taken at the South Pacific Star Party near Mudgee, NSW.
We tried to bring out the star colours and the dark dust lanes in the Milky Way near the Coalsack.
Any comments or suggestions are most welcome. We have found it fairly difficult to find a good balance between nebulosity and star brightness, so any tips on how to get the best out of this region of the sky would be appreciated!
Cheers,
Trent and Julie.
Details as follows;
Canon 1000d
Autoguided on a HEQ5 Mount
Exposure 28 x 240sec @ ISO 800
Stacked in DSS
Processed in CS3
Wow! I like that orientation and FOV. What lens did you use? Personally I like the colour contrast you guys have achieved. The reduced version certainly shows the detail. Are you shooting in jpeg or raw?
Wow! I like that orientation and FOV. What lens did you use? Personally I like the colour contrast you guys have achieved. The reduced version certainly shows the detail. Are you shooting in jpeg or raw?
Cheers 1 ponders,
This was all done in RAW, it went from a 57Mb file to 200k for ice in space so I guess some resolution could be lost there, however,we expected a little bit more detail from the amount of data we collected, does the detail gets lost in the sheer size, if so why does the Galactic Centre shot look so detailed ???
It looks like you have some great data in there but your compression appear really heavy in the jpeg. How do you resize your images once you've finished working with them?
When you finish DSS to you use the autosave.tif file to open into Photoshop? Do you adjust your image in PS as a tif file? or as a jpeg?
I have been saving the final product off DSS and then working on it in CS3 as a TIFF, I use canvas/image resize to attempt to reduce the footprint size (so its a bit more presentable on iceinspace)
Hmmm, I shall keep on at it.
Ok. If I use DSS I like to use the Autosave version as its unadjusted. But that's just my preference.
In PS, when saving for upload, rather than using the method you describe, I use the Save for web and devices option under the file menu. If you've not used it, it allows you to view your original against an optimized one. You can adjust size and jpeg quality and at the same time see the final file size. I adjust my image size to around 900 wide to fit on the IIS image page and then muck around with the quality slider until the file size under the optimized image is below 200 kb. All the while keeping an eye on what the optimizer is doing to the quality of the image in the display window. If it looks too chuncky and harsh, raise the optimizer slider and reduce the image size. Works a treat
Rob,
It was good to meet you to, thankfully we survived the line, but what a star party!
Lester,
The shot was with your standard Canon 18-35mm lens at F4.6
We have come to the obvious conclusion (with the help offered here) that we needed a tad more exposure time and less ISO in future, I guess there is some noob left in us yet....
We have come to the obvious conclusion (with the help offered here) that we needed a tad more exposure time and less ISO in future, I guess there is some noob left in us yet....
Cheers
The density of stars in the Milky Way in this shot seems quite low for 2 hours of data. The 1000D doesn't seem to have not much sensitivity for astrophotography work. Or am I missing something ?
The density of stars in the Milky Way in this shot seems quite low for 2 hours of data. The 1000D doesn't seem to have not much sensitivity for astrophotography work. Or am I missing something ?
I think we both maybe missing something..... the 1000d is an entry level camera, it isn't by any means top of the range, however we did have some success with the offset galactic centre shot, so I guess I expected a bit more of that nice yellow nebulousity at that length of exposure .......
One thing is for sure is that the subs of both shots closely resemble the final product. It's obvious I've done something wrong with this effort, so I will attempt this again soon, this time ensuring I have the yellow tinge in the subs........
Did you guys take dark frames, as well as flat frames?
There is a wealth of data hidden in that image that is vying to be seen.
H
H,
This is where the noob becomes evident, no darks and no flats, I was under the impression that with internal noise rejection would deal with this, I now know that this may not be the case at all... these things will change at my next attempt, consider it lesson learned.
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