DSLR used for astrophotography???

[OzEclipse]

I have upgraded camera arriving tomorrow - if the weather permits, I'll be trying some new shots - taking into account the tips provided here.

Meanwhile, I had a total flop last night - all my bad - but this picture was taken with my D50, wide open, for 2 seconds of Venus. It's not a "good" shot, taken with a poor camera, but I'm curious what the blue spot is?

venus_202001151942.jpg

It's an internal or possibly external reflection of venus.

I've drawn two diagonals to mark the centre. Note that the reflection is diametrically opposed to Venus, exactly where a reflection should be.

Did you have a UV or skylight "protection" filter on the lens? The cheaper versions of these filters frequently produce these type of reflections because they don't have the same coatings as camera lenses.
If so, try it with the filter off.

Cheers

Joe

[lsintampa]

I have upgraded camera arriving tomorrow - if the weather permits, I'll be trying some new shots - taking into account the tips provided here.

Meanwhile, I had a total flop last night - all my bad - but this picture was taken with my D50, wide open, for 2 seconds of Venus. It's not a "good" shot, taken with a poor camera, but I'm curious what the blue spot is?

venus_202001151942.jpg

It's an internal or possibly external reflection of venus.

venus_202001151942.jpg

I've drawn two diagonals to mark the centre. Note that the reflection is diametrically opposed to Venus, exactly where a reflection should be.

Did you have a UV or skylight "protection" filter on the lens? The cheaper versions of these filters frequently produce these type of reflections because they don't have the same coatings as camera lenses.
If so, try it with the filter off.

Cheers

Joe

Yes a UV filter on the lens.... I've always only kept them on so the lens itself is protected. Thanks!

[lsintampa]

So my new camera is a Nikon D5300. It has live view which is awesome. However when I setup and point towards Orion (for example) all I see is black. There are no stars visable in the livev vew at all. Makes it near impossible to focus.

I had ISO at 1600, f4 18mm lens, 5"

Anyway. It seems I'm missing the point somewhere. I thought live view was to help focusing? Sort of hard when the screen is black with no stars in the view.

I took some shots anyway and obviously caught some stars.

[Juno16]

Hi Isintampa,

You will have to point the camera at a bright star or distant light, preferably while on a tripod or mount. Manually focus through the viewfinder to get close. Turn on live view on, move the camera to get a star or light in the center of the view. Press the “+” button (looks like a magnifying glass with a “+” in the middle) to zoom in on the star. Press the “+” button multiple times to zoom in as much as possible. Manually focus the lens with max “+” and place a piece of tape on the focus ring to hold it in place.

BTW, nice camera, I really like mine!

Thanks,
Jim

[lsintampa]

So 15 seconds @ f/8 18mm shot of Orion

It has to get better than this - no?

[Juno16]

So 15 seconds @ f/8 18mm shot of Orion

It has to get better than this - no?

_DSC8203_lzn.jpg

When you have optimized the focus, perhaps more exposure by increasing the iso, or setting the lens at the minimum aperture.

Are you using a tracking mount or stationary tripod?

Not a bad image though. How good are your skies?

Jim

[ARock]

So 15 seconds @ f/8 18mm shot of Orion

It has to get better than this - no?

Getting better. Try posting a link to the raw file either in google drive or dropbox.

[OzEclipse]

So 15 seconds @ f/8 18mm shot of Orion

It has to get better than this - no?

_DSC8203_lzn.jpg

Hi I sin,
Why shoot at f8?
I concede that 1930's photographer Arthur Fellig said, "f8 and be there!"
But I am pretty sure he wasn't talking about astrophotography in 2020.

Don't be afraid to open the lens up.
Vivir con miedo, es como vivir a medias!

15s@f8 is the same as 4s@f4.
At f8, the depth of field will mask focusing errors.

cheers

Joe

[lsintampa]

So 15 seconds @ f/8 18mm shot of Orion

It has to get better than this - no?

_DSC8203_lzn.jpg

When you have optimized the focus, perhaps more exposure by increasing the iso, or setting the lens at the minimum aperture.

Are you using a tracking mount or stationary tripod?

Not a bad image though. How good are your skies?

Jim

Sky is zone 7. No tracking.

[lsintampa]

So 15 seconds @ f/8 18mm shot of Orion

It has to get better than this - no?

Getting better. Try posting a link to the raw file either in google drive or dropbox.

Link to raw file here:

[UlteriorModem]

That looks like either it was taken early in the evening at dusk, during a raging full moon, or your skyglow is incredibly high!

[lsintampa]

That looks like either it was taken early in the evening at dusk, during a raging full moon, or your skyglow is incredibly high!

10:40 PM - last evening - no full moon (below the horizon)

might add that I don't have a skyglow filter

[UlteriorModem]

Yea even with a sky glow filter your still going to have problems. The sky glow filter will require longer duration exposures I am afraid.

The only way your going to improve your results is to get out of the city to a darker site. But at least you now have the groundwork laid out so when you do go to a darker site you wont be fumbling around.

[UlteriorModem]

Here I played a little with your image in PixInsight. This is about the best I can do with all that background noise!

One other thing I noticed was that there evidently was a lot of moisture in the air besides the obvious clouds. This just makes the skyglow even worse.

_DSC8203_ABE by Tom Whit, on Flickr

[lsintampa]

Here I played a little with your image in PixInsight. This is about the best I can do with all that background noise!

One other thing I noticed was that there evidently was a lot of moisture in the air besides the obvious clouds. This just makes the skyglow even worse.

Well, it is Florida and we had a front coming through - was very cloudy - humidity (as always) high.

[Baurice]

Strange how some of the replies are contrary to my own experience. I have little difficulty with finding focus without live view and even find live view on my Nikon D3200 is not that accurate. The short answer is to try everything that has been suggested and find what works for you.

I find that an undriven DSLR gives me more than enough things to snap without getting into long-exposure driven AP but then that's just me. We all have our own paths to tread.

The sort of objects that make good targets for this type of photography are:

1. Moon
2. Sun when it is active and you have filters
3. Phases of Venus (tough but doable)
4. Jupiter's moons
5. Saturn's moon Titan
6. Bright deep sky objects, such as M45, M42, M44, Melotte 20, M31, Melotte 111
7. Constellations
8. Meteors
9. Bright comets
10, Atmospheric phenomena: aurorae, rainbows, noctilucent clouds

I don't have a big budget. There's a myth around that as you get more experienced your budget gets bigger but mine is constantly shrinking!

[ARock]

Hard to beat Tom's processing of the RAW file. But compare it with your naked eye view of the sky. I think you can see upto Mag 7 stars in the processed single shot. One way to lessen skyglow might be to take shots pointing up at the zenith.
A few next steps
1. Play around with zoom, aperture, focus, exposure time, ISO to see what works in your skies.
Get started with RAW processing
2. Take 20 shots instead of 1 with the same framing, and stack them in Deep Sky Stacker (DSS) (free)
3. Add Darks, Bias shots and add them to the DSS processing. (google how to take Darks, Bias)
4. Tweak the light curves and stretch inside DSS, or process the autosave file from DSS in gimp (free).

You can also upload Tom's processed file to nova.astrometry.net, to automatically platesolve and label the objects in it. This can be useful if you take shots of random parts of the sky, and have no idea what the stars/constellations there are.

[lsintampa]

Tom, thanks for the processed file.... I uploaded it to http://nova.astrometry.net/ and it came up with a lot of stars, etc.

I took the same raw file and edited it with GIMP and came up with this:

I noticed that in the image I processed that Betelgeuse is sort of orange/red - which makes sense. Other stars are of various colors - red / white / blue, etc.

The file that I processed fails every time I upload it to nova.astrometry.net ---- and I've no clue why that is.

In terms of "processing" the raw file, I have to admit I've no clue what I'm doing - so it seems that is yet another skill set I'll need to learn.

Is it just a matter of tweaking your raw file into something that is "appealing" or is there some method of how to "process" your files.

That said, I'm happier with the new camera.

Any comments on the file that I made, would be appreciated. Still trying to get a grip on it all.

Thanks!!!

[ARock]

Hmm, maybe it is taking too long on astrometry and timing out. I tried the jpg file from your last post on astrometry.net running locally on my laptop and got this

Look for youtube tutorials on how to process night sky astro images in gimp.

[metastable]

you've got a lot of light pollution / sky glow in your shooting location. also your aperture was f8.0... you'd want to use the smallest possible # here (wide open).