[gs2c]

Last year I try to use Pentax k5 Shooting planet.To my surprised. it's better than I used QHY5 shooting.
SkyWatcher 200 reflector TV3x+orion2X pentax k5

[Stone G.]

Amazing clarity and detail for a DSLR planetary image.

I am not sure, I understand all details in your setup so, what is the Effective Focal Length here:"SkyWatcher 200 reflector TV3x+orion2X" pentax k5 ? Have you stacked two Barlow lenses or similar?

[gs2c]

I have stacked two Barlow.The real focal may be exceed 4800mm.And I shoot it used k5 video mode.
To get 1700 fps images and stack 700 fps in registax.

[Ex Finn.]

Nice end-result.

[VisualDarkness]

I failed at my first attempt with a Sigma 150-500 at 500mm + Kenko 1.5x. I missed focus entirely on every shot but I couldn't see anything in neither Liveview nor the viewfinder and I didn't have any light to read the scale on the lens, This was at the stop of focusing ring (took a chance) and it's probably way past infinity also I see why you need some kind of tracking.

[pixelsaurus]

Out of focus perhaps but it sure shows unsaturated colour in the stars.

[VisualDarkness]

Out of focus perhaps but it sure shows unsaturated colour in the stars.

Did I forget to add "underexposed" by a lot?

[Brian Mould]

I usually try to set focus on a bright star then move over to whatever I want to shoot.The more zoom you use...the better your tracking has to be

[Brian Mould]

madbrain...there are cheaper mounts out there like a an eq2 or 3 but you will have to put a drive motor on the ra axis and their periodic error may not be anything too great for a long exposure high power shot. Polar aligning for a more reliable track takes a bit of time and you will still need to manually correct any errors which is where the high dollar self correcting mounts come in .The largest lens I use is my 350mm tamron with it piggy backed on my 1200mm telescope with a luminated 12.5mm eyepiece manually correcting on my guide star of choice.
Astrophotography is rewarding but can also squish any bit of will out of you if you expect to duplicate what you see in the magazines.Those are combined exposures of hours through large apertures and specialized cooled CCD cameras that would run circles around any SLR modified or not.That being said, you can still do amazing images with a DSLR just start wide.The challege and joy of any photography for me is to use the camera as a tool to make it see what my eye sees and with astrophotography, make it see what my eye cannot.

[piesforyou]

Took this in the New Forest last week, it's a fairly small portion of the milky way. It's not centred on any particular constellation or other feature, I just wanted to see how many stars I could pick up!

It's a stack of about 85 exposures, each is 10 seconds @ ISO3200. Pentax-M 50mm F1.7 @ F2.8. Used DeepSkyStacker to rotate and stack the images. It was a moonless night, which helped, although there was some high cloud drifting across the frames. That all gets cancelled out in the stacking process though. I tried using DeepSkyStacker to count the stars but it topped out at about 20,000 without getting even close to all of them. I'd estimate there's maybe somewhere in the region of 100,000 or more stars.

[Brian Mould]

nice capture and nice stacking...I still haven`t tried any stacking though I have two programs downloaded. What a wonderful lens that is. I have an F 50 1.7 that I use a lot for sky shots and aurora, gathers light quicky .Do you use the 28mm much for night shots?? I`ve been thinking of getting one

[piesforyou]

I haven't used the 28mm for astrophotography yet. I'd like to get a wide angle with a slightly larger aperture, and one that's a bit sharper wide open. I do love the Pentax-M 28mm F2.8, I used it almost exclusively on holiday in New Zealand.

As for software, the main ones I use are Star Trails (for making star trails, obviously), DeepSkyStacker which has a really good range of stacking techniques, and also GRIP which is really good at rotating and warping the images. So for the below image, which was taken with the 18-55mm kit lens, I found that DeepSkyStacker did not rotate and align the images well due to the bad distortion at wide angle on this lens. However, GRIP has a "warp" mode which doesn't just rotate the images but applies a warp which ensures each star is aligned across the entire the frame. So I used GRIP to warp the images and save them, then DeepSkyStacker to stack the images (without rotating them).

I wish I'd used a higher ISO in this shot. It's about 100 exposures, F3.5 and ISO1600 with the 18-55mm kit lens @ 18mm

[Brian Mould]

very nice...and thanks for the info. I`m going to have to find the time to experiment

[pixelsaurus]

Nice rendition of the Southern Cross.

[zambonikane]

Here is a resent stack of 21 shots of 90 seconds each taken by my Kx through a Tamron 90mm f/2.8. I think I had the lens stopped down a little (maybe 4.5?). Anyway, this is the cygnus region and shows a couple of nebulae (North America, Pelican). The resulting stack was tweaked in Photoshop (levels and curves, followed by some of Neil Carboni's "Astro-Actions" to get rid of purple fringing and to add diffraction spikes. I hope you like!
Mike