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Forum: Monthly Photo Contests
01-25-2024, 04:41 PM
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White Family Barn in Saline County IL, nightscape photo
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-03-2024, 09:08 PM
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Winter sky, in Southern Illinois
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Forum: Winners' Showcase
10-13-2023, 10:30 PM
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The most beautiful home I have seen in Southern IL, Gallatin County.
#tracked #stacked #blend #composite
FG: 120s f/4 ISO3200 x3 frames, stacked for NR
Sky: 30s f/2.8 ISO 3200 x 10 frames tracked w/ Astrotracer, stacked for NR
This is technically a composite. I moved the camera approximately 150 yards to clear the vegetation and get a clear view of the sky, so I could blend it in without having to deal with blurred/clipped landscape features. Direction of view was exactly the same as foreground, I lined the sky stack up with the sky in the foreground images.
Thanks for your consideration :) <3 my Pentax, makes these types of shots trivial. Pentax we need a monochrome K1 Mk M, with Astrotracer, kthanks.
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Forum: Monthly Photo Contests
01-02-2022, 09:28 PM
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Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex Deep Sky Image
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-28-2021, 11:29 PM
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Nightscape image of Milky Way over the river at Cave-In-Rock
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Forum: Monthly Photo Contests
02-20-2022, 10:54 PM
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One Horse Gap Lake, (2/15/22)
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-29-2021, 09:26 PM
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Orion Nebula and Wide Field Area
This is just under 2 hours of HDR data, over 1 hour on the wide area and dust clouds, and about 30 minutes on the Orion Nebula core, which is super bright. (This is a work in progress, so I haven't nailed down the exact number of frames that were used after DSS rejection)
This was shot clean with no filter in town, Bortle 5 skies. I am amazed at how much detail came out in the dust clouds after LP removal, (DBE in Pixinsight)
Wide field frames were shot at 50s, f/2, ISO400; I think it was like 66 frames.
25 frames at 25s for the core, other settings were equal
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-29-2021, 08:17 PM
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Thank you! The foreground was a few images stacked for noise reduction and 1 Light-painted image to fill out the shadows on the bluff. The sky is a single image, Astrotracer, 90s, f/1.8 ISO400. The tracked sky image was then layered into the foreground using Photoshop. I use Pixinsight for star reduction and any gradient, LP removal, but I don't like to remove LP completely.
Edit: Oh! and the foreground was 30s exposures. The reddish tint is partly due to the sandstone, but also there was a sodium vapor security light up the stairwell behind me shining right on that bluff. It didn't expose all the shadows in the rock though so that's why I blended in a light-painted shot.
---------- Post added 12-29-21 at 09:28 PM ----------
Thank you! We have very few foreground options around here in this land of many hills and trees; sightlines to the sky are few and far between, and those with interesting subject matter are even more rare. Mostly it's just churches and cemeteries and old barns, but even most of those have trees all over the place. The two locations where you can actually get above the canopy and get an epic view and have some foreground interest, well everyone shoots those. We are lucky to have relatively dark skies for any area east of the Mississippi, but we are often forced to be creative and maybe a little weird if we want to do something different. Thanks again!
---------- Post added 12-29-21 at 10:09 PM ----------
Thank you for that! I tend toward natural color in my sky photos, so I like to look for opportunities to shoot foregrounds with red and orange/brown elements to accentuate the emission nebulae and dust clouds, respectively. That also leaves some margin for error with LP which tends to be orange also.
---------- Post added 12-29-21 at 10:10 PM ----------
Thank you! I explained some of it in a reply above. Let me know if you need to know anything more specific!
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-29-2021, 07:59 PM
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Those are great questions. For the first one, I'll break it down a bit. The six hours is an estimate, because I'm really not done; I want to get up to 12 hours total for this one. That was the goal anyway; I might call it good after 9, as that tends to be my MO, lol. Anyway, I have taken WAY more than 6 hours of images for this. I think I'm at 5 separate nights with various time allotments. I manually review each RAW file and reject any that have obvious tracking issues or artifacts from man-made objects. I would estimate that fraction of rejects to be pretty high, but I don't log them. It's probably between 1/4 and 1/3 of all exposures. Then I stack in DSS using separate groups for each night's lights and flats. I also let DSS cull frames automagically, and I decrease the number of frames accepted by 5% for each group, (night). I'm willing to lose a few extra each night in the name of added precision, because I'm adding significantly more than 5% frames and I want to be sure to reject any outliers my eye didn't pick up. Whenever I decide to be done, I want to be around maybe 70-75% acceptance; I'm thinking I will probably run a second stack at 90% and see if there is a substantial difference in quality.
For your aperture question, oddly the lens has a 77mm front filter ring, butI did some research and some other nerds have found the effective focal length is closer to 130mm and the entrance pupil measured with calipers is 64.85mm = F/2. Regardless, it's being brought down to 48mm by the filter, (they call it a 2" filter, (but it is attached to a 48mm step down ring, so I feel like that may be a more accurate way to judge it), so I would say 135/48=2.8, or even 130mm/48 = 2.71
---------- Post added 12-29-21 at 09:00 PM ----------
I'm using the Skywatcher Star Adventurer. Thank you!
---------- Post added 12-29-21 at 09:01 PM ----------
Thank you! I'm still working on it :)
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-28-2021, 08:20 PM
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This is 6 hours of exposure data on the Heart and Soul Nebula, extreme wide-field.
Frames are 120s, f/2, ISO6400
Optolong L-Extreme Filter was utilized to accentuate Ha signal
(To adapt Samyang 135 f/2 to 2" filter use a 77-49 and then a 49-48 step-down. You can still shoot full frame, even wide open)
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