Well, I finally made my first nighttime excursion to the lake for astroscapes/astrophotography for the new year. At least I think it's the first of the new year... maybe... Was able to make my first stacked image as well (learning DSS is an adventure, I tell you...). I haven't gone through all of the images that I took tonight yet, but here are a few jpegs of some of the better ones, plus my stacked image that DSS output (no tinkering in post.. yet). All images were taken with my K-50 utilizing the SMC Pentax-M 28mm f/2.8 manual lens. I shot RAW+ tonight so I have quite a few raw images for potential later editing/PP/stacking. I wasn't sure earlier in the night if I would be able to go since we have clouds rolling in, but I took a chance and got a window of relief before it's supposed to go pure overcast.







So far these seem to be 3 of the nicest ones that I saw in my initial delve into the transferred images from the sd card.

Here's my first stacked image using DSS. I took 6 images, 3 light, 3 dark, ISO 640, infinity focus f/2.8, 13 sec. exposure:



These images will be xposted to any/all relevant threads.

---------- Post added 03-31-15 at 02:05 AM ----------

Ugh... the heck is up with the site layout today? It's all squashed and wonky looking...

Nevermind... I just found the reason in site help section.

[Aaron28]

nice the moon is lighting up the scene nicely in the 1st 3

[Auzzie-Phoenix]

Yup... the moon was certainly out last night. Makes it harder to get my pure astro's but makes for nice astroscapes. I think sometime soon I'll try running the raw files through dss so that I can see what the output will look like on those.

[Aaron28]

the moon hurts for star fields for sure but great for the scapes! I haven't really used DSS lately as I have been doin star trails / time lapse videos using starstaxx and nero 2014. when I start chasing the galactic plane again I polly will use DSS again but it seemed to only help with noise and not necessarily help making it brighter or more defined but don't have a good deal of experience working with it.......the last I worked with it was comet lovejoy and could not really tell a big advantage over a single frame or 6-10 frames........hoping for quite a few camping trips with clear weather!

[Auzzie-Phoenix]

I just tried the raw images through dss and no noticeable improvement over the jpg version of the same. Truth be told I've not seen any advantage of stacking with limited images over the single snapshot. I think DSS is probably best used for longer lenses/longer exposures when you're trying to get nebula captures. At least that seems to be where its advantage lies.

[Aaron28]

yea I think so as well thus far with my limited experience.....noise reduction seems the only perk with my Olympus e-510 which is 8 years old and not necessary with the k-50 but may need it using the K-r (don't know yet)