[Das Boot]

I need a little advice on getting my stars shots better. I took a couple of shots last night here:

FA 50mm 1.4 - 6 minutes @ 5.6 / ISO 100... That's Subaru on the right


FA 50mm 1.4 - 10 minutes @ 5.6 / ISO 100... The orange and yellow in the upper right is the top of a tree

I used my barndoor and got one of the best alignments ever. I'm still getting a little drift which I believe is part of the build of the device (I hand crank it a quarter turn every 15 seconds). To fix this, I'm going to use deep sky stacker with shorter exposures (maybe around 2 minutes each) - still with the barndoor. My biggest problem is I'm not getting the Milky Way. It should be in both of these shots. Am I adjusting too much for black? I didn't see it before the adjustment. I'm also debating if I should convert the photos to greyscale and then color the sky as I like it. I'm getting some funky results with what I think is the Bayer Interpolation (maybe this would get fixed with stacking). What should I do? I'd like to use this in a type of composite shot, but would like to get a better quality shot.

Thanks,
Brian

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Last edited by Das Boot; 11-08-2009 at 06:55 PM.

[Das Boot]

I did adjust the second picture and got more stars. I also had forgot about those two planes. The blue on the upper left is probably a poor adjustment with the blue channel and the moon rising in that direction. Still no Milky Way though.

[jezza323]

is there much light pollution where you are? I was able to get the milky way to show up on an ISO 1600 15 sec exposure at f4.0 (no tracking mount for me ). For processing i shot RAW (PEF), imported to lightroom, added +1.50 exposure (this really helped), turned the blacks from default 5 down to 0. A bunch of those stacked with Deep Sky Stacker resulted in the following image. However this was in an area with almost no light pollution, you could make out the milky way with your naked eyes...

[Ex Finn.]

That came out nice jezza, what focal length did you use?.

Cheers, Mike.

[jezza323]

that is 18mm (DA 18-55 AL II, K200D)

definately give the processing things ive mentioned a go on the images you have, see if it helps!

[Ben_Edict]

Jezza, that's a great shot for such short exposure times. I envy your dark sky...

Mike, I think, you have made your sky way too black. That will swallow any faint nebulosity and probably your Milky Way, too. Nevertheless, as Jezza noted, if your sky is not poitch dark, it is very hard to capture the Milky Way.

From a 6 minute exposure, though I would expect, a very bright sky brackground, if the area is really light polluted.I can't go much beyond 1.5 minutes in my small town, withou getting already a brightened background.

Also, ISO 100 is very low, for the Milky Way. Pump up the ISO, as Jezza did.

Ben