Hey everyone. I went out last night with a Star Wheel, a Compass, and of course my photography gear to try to capture a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy.

My Equipment:
Pentax K-5 II 16MP
Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8
Manfrotto Tripod(60" Compact Action Tripod)

Unfortunately, I lack the funds for a Tracking Mount and I also lack the patience to build a barn door tracker.
The Tripod is only supposed to handle 3.3lbs, but I have a more sturdy tripod that can handle up to 9lbs on the way.

I took 481 Light Frames, and out of those I kept 399 Light Frames. The settings I used for the Light Frames were:
Exposure: 3 seconds
Aperture: f/3.2 (I figured if I stopped down even slightly it would help IQ)
ISO: 6400

I also took 20 Dark Frames at the same settings but with Lens Cap on.
And I took 20 Bias Frames with 1/8000th Shutter Speed instead of 3s, and lens cap on.

I used the 2x Drizzle option on DSS when I stacked the pictures, and then I did a short workflow in photoshop with levels and curves, and followed that up by importing the picture into Lightroom as that is my preferred software for simple editing.

Anyone with pointers on either shooting Andromeda or Post Processing please let me know. I would like to get better and the only way to do that is to learn from others' expertise.

With all that said, here is the resulting picture I got. Let me know what you all think!




Thanks!
-Isaac


UPDATE****************************************


So I found an amazing spot, and managed to get the OGPS-1 unit working. Here are two images I was able to get from last night. The first is M31, Andromeda, and the second is M33, the Triangulum Galaxy. Let me know what yall think of them. I also got an UWA shot with an old abandoned church.

Settings for both M31 and M33 were

45 seconds
ISO 3200
f/2.8 Aperture

The Andromeda picture is comprised of 25 Light Frames, whereas the Triangulum picture is made with 13 Light Frames. I had more but they weren't good enough.

I would say that is pretty nice for a non-guided picture! I bet you don't see much on a single 3s frame. Two things I'd like to mention: I would probably try to counter balance the blue tint using RGB curves and maybe not clip so agressively on the left side of the histogram, the sky doesn't have to be totally black, you may be loosing details in the outer parts of the galaxy.

Clear skies!

What color should it look like? And as far as the clipping goes I will take a look at it. I still have the DSS auto save file intact for re-edits.

I usually try to balance background color to be neutral. In this case much of the background is at 0, 0, 0 so there is nothing to balance but if you look at andromeda and many stars in your picture they have a strong blue tint that results from post-processing and can be corrected to some degree certainly. BTW did you look into getting the O-GPS1? It's half the price of an iOptron sky tracker. I get 40 s with a 200 mm lens, other get much longer tracking times. You'd get a huge boost in your signal to noise ratio.

looks pretty damn good Isaac! envy ya.....haven't found it to shoot it!

Aaron28: I had such a hard time finding it the first few times I tried. In fact I never did until last night. Having the Star Wheel and a compass allowed me to know what stars I was looking at, and then when I knew about what area Andromeda was supposed to be in, I used the 70mm side of my lens and a very long shutter speed to make it jump out at me. Then I just kept recentering and zooming in until I had it framed in the 200mm focal range.

SunValley: I have thought about the OGPS-1 many times but I always worried it wouldn't be a significant help. I will have to relook at it I guess. 40 seconds is huge. Even 30s would be an astronomical improvement to 3s. If I found a way to link you the DSS file, would you like to try your hand at editing it so I can understand the workflow and what potential the image has? Also, do you have any pics that you have taken of Andromeda or Orion or something using the OGPS-1 that I could look at?

Also, for your curiosity, here is a photoshop job I did on it to balance and darken everything except the Galaxy while trying to pull out more of the extremeties of the Galaxy and below that is one of the original light frames so you can see what my 3s brought me.





Thanks guys,
-Isaac



The funny thing is that the original has a yellow glow but after DSS everything is tinted blue.

nice....yeh I will hunt and peck until I find it! did get a star wheel for my bday so I may have better luck!

I used O-GPS1 at my K5 since last winter for a few month. It is a great tool as it gives me 10x longer exposure time than without (max. ca. 20 secs. at 200 mm with acceptable trailing). But beause of this limitation and the fact that I had to stand near my K5 and manually release the shutter (my new K3 II is different at that point) I bought myself the small Skywatcher Star Adventurer mount that is light weight, small and quite inexpensive. It can carry 2 cameras at the same time (my K3II and my OM-D EM5 simultanuously pointing on different targets)!!! This brings me up to 4 minutes exposure with the Sigma 70-200 mm and allows lower ISO and smaller aperture. Besides this the main advantage is that no correction of azimuth and inclination has to be applied during the session because it follows the target autonomously all night. So if you have to stand up early to go to work you can set the camera to interval shooting (remote release or e.g. triggertrap), go to bed and let the system do the job. But the O-GPS1 (or the similar System in the K3II) will stay my best option for shorter lenses while travelling. Here two examples of shots done with O-GPS1:

Here's an exemple of Andromeda with 21 X 40s subs taken with a good old Pentax-M 200 f/4. I had taken 25 but 4 had too much trailling. 200 is a bit long for the astrotracer. My favorite lens for it is my 50 mm F1.4. Here's a link to a few pictures l have taken with it.

Maybe send me a dropbox link to your image and I'll give it a try.

Wow! Looking at that one sub shows how much work must have gone into making the image! That 2nd image definitely has a more neutral background.

@Aaron28 If you have a planetarium software like "Cartes du Ciel" on your computer you can get the azimut and altitude of your target for a specific time. The o-gps1 will give you the azimut you'll have to guess the altitude. It may help.

@Pete_XL Those are pretty impressive pics. What lens did you use?

@SunValley Thanks, having followed your linkt to flickr I can give back the compliment to you. The lens was a Sigma 70-200 mm F2.8 EX DK OS HSM. At that time I had problems with finding sharp focus and having the aperture too wide open due to short exposure time. Now I use a Bahtinovmask and wait for darker and longer nights with the Star Adveturer mount.


@Aaron28 If you have a Smartphone or Ipad there are great apps like Skywalk for little money. A great help is to use the search mode of the app having the smartphone pressed plane against the back of the camera. It suffers from a bit of magnetic misguiding because of the metal in the camerabody. But lets you point easily, fast and quite good directly to the target if you center the object in the middle of the screen while having it pressed parallel against the camera back. If nothing helps I take a picture and sent it to astrometry.net to get info in a minute of what I have in front of my lens or in the picture (expecially shooting on tiny dark objects like M51 and nebulas that you cannot identify in the single pictures).

Some further ideas concerning finding, pointing and shooting: dark deep sky objects are (at least for me) not easy to locate and it is sometimes very hard to get them get into the picture, expecially with long lenses and objects you can not see directly. I sometimes needed 1/2 an hour or so and also sometimes did not even manage get them into the Frame with a 200 mm lens mounted.


The biggest step forward was to buy a cheap green 532nm/500mW laser pointer that I mount on the hot shoe of the cam on a small ball head and hot shoe adapter. The beam is visible up to the stars like a thin laser sword (be careful of planes nearby!!!). I center the beam it with ballhead in viewfinder (aiming at the next garage door) so that the beam ideally ends in the center of the frame before the star shooting session begins (not centered as bad as in the example below). Then I can point with mounted laser and camera directly at the sky object or to a neighboured reference object and be shure it is inside the frame even if I can not identify it on the single shot because it is too dark. With help of the beam I now find the targets within a few seconds.


If I am in spite of the laser still in doubt or have nor reference object I shoot a jpeg and load it up to astrometry.net/upload to make shure or adjust the setup (see example of triangulum galaxy below - with wiggly and decentralized laser beam. Evaluation is a question of a Minute or so.The galaxy can hardly be identified in the original picture, but as you see in the astrometry.net evaluation it is inside the frame, needs some small adjustment though).


For me it helps a lot, I hope fellow sufferers in cold nights find it helpful too.

So if it's a faint object and you don't have a motorised mount, how do you keep it centred while you take a series of images?

thanks pete but I have neither just a dumb phone with Nintendo mobile web! someday though by golly!

So what I did was since I could tell which star was the center of Andromeda, I just kept an eye and every 30 shots or so recentered that star. Would estimate, then take a shot, and keep correcting til I was ready for another batch of 30.

Indeed, with my little motorized star adventurer (travel-)mount it is no problem anymore - it simply follows the object without need of further intervention after I once have nailed the object within the frame.

Using the O-GPS1 with the K5 or the built-in Astrotracer with the K3 II requires more effort with invisible or faint objects. Sometimes I see the object for the first time after having stacked 50 shots with DSS (e.g. nebula). To keep the object within the center region I look for obvious constellations of stars in the frame that I can easily remember as a "landmark" (e.g. triangles of stars or lined up stars, prolongation of a line between significant stars etc., see example below ) relative to the target. Then I shoot a session of several photos and use the front wheel to scroll fast back- and forwards to watch the "landmark" move over the screen from photo to photo. When the target shifts out of the center third I make a small correction, first in azimut to the west, then inclination. Lighting the laser pointer that is mounted on the hot-shoe (with K3 II) for a moment helps a lot with this. Using the K5 with the O-GPS1 mounted on the hot-shoe I have the laser mounted on a second tripod pointing on a significant "landmark" to have a reference that I can easily see in the viewfinder or live view.


I simply have the laser pointer taped horizontally onto a 5€-flash-stand to have a thread to connect it to the second tripod (K5). With this thread the flash stand can also be connected to a tiny novoflex ballhead that itself can be fixed on the hot shoe with a small 1/4" male hot shoe adapter (K3 II). Perhaps you think this sounds like overacting but it is inexpensive, pragmatic and easy to use. The laser saved me hours of frustation yet and has the advantage that I can show other persons what I am shooting at using it as a pointer into the sky.