My first real attempt at astrophotography, Orion
Taken from my Canon EOS T2i, mounted to the top of my telescope. Thirty 10-second exposures. Manually subtracted the same dark frame from every one to account for the many dead pixels, then manually aligned and stacked in GIMP. No idea what I'm doing, but I like it good enough. Stacked with Siril. Should have done that from the start lol
Next time I'm gonna try to capture it high in the sky instead of when it's at the horizon, and I'm gonna watch a tutorial on stacking instead of dicking around blindly
EDIT: I followed a tutorial! At least, as best as I could with one dark frame and no bias or flats. Still, a massive improvement over manual stacking. Still just dicked around with the colors and levels in GIMP after stacking, but you can sort of see M42 now!
Original picture for posterity. This is what the first 10 comments saw.
Hey, nice! Solid focus, which is tough to do with a DSLR. You’ve even got a shot of the Orion Nebula there to the left.
Your stacking process is, uh… nonstandard. You’ve got the core principles there though. Something like Siril is free and powerful and can help you fill in the gaps in the process. Have fun!
That’s not the Orion Nebula to the left. The Orion Nebula isn’t seen in this photo but it would be south of his belt on the left.
Procyon is the star to the left.
Rotate the image 90 degrees anticlockwise, you're looking at his sword 👍
I forgot to rotate the picture, so it's sideways. Betelgeuse is at the top right, m42 is center left. I don't blame you for not seeing it, I admit it's not a very good picture
EDIT: I have updated the post with a better processed picture, and a slightly more visible M42
What ISO and aperture did you use to take those 10-second pictures? And how did you follow the movement while taking the photos?
ISO was 1600. Looking at the image metadata, I believe f/5 is the number you're looking for? I'm still quite new to this. I shot it with this lens, focal length was 47mm
Mounted it on top of a celestron astromaster 130EQ, which has a threaded camera mount on it. Side note, I could write a few paragraphs about how much I don't recommend this telescope. The motor helped keep Orion in roughly the same spot for the whole 5ish minutes I was taking pictures, though
While there are star trackers (devices you mount your camera to to follow the movement of the stars) usually you have a steady camera and then align the images in post-processing with a program like Sequator, StarStax or Siril (other paid options also available).
I imagine that is possible with fast shutter speeds, but if you expose
3010 seconds with a big focal length (OP used a telescope)?It was on top of an equatorial mounted telescope. I do want to use the scope as a lens at some point but it needs a Barlow lens to focus, and that magnifies the image so much that any wind at all will ruin a picture