I really have the bug now! This was a lot of fun with barely any equipment
Dslr, 50mm f1.8 lens, and a tripod.
I can’t wait to get a star tracker now
Looks really great, especially for a first attempt. What was your processing workflow? How many frames did you take?
Hey thanks a lot! This was my 2nd attempt at all, but my first with an actual target, not Just snapping a picture of the sky
I wrote up my method here https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/12982996
Let me know if you have any feedback or ideas too, I’m here to learn :D
Could you post more information about the technique you used? Things like, if you used stacking, the number of images, and the exposure time? I like your result, and I’d love to try to reproduce it.
Thank you for your interest and compliments :) I was following advice from Nico Carvers channel for taking the frames: I am in a Bottle 4/5 sky so am decently lucky in that regard I took 400 light frames ( had to cull about half though) at 3sec exposure time to try and keep sharpess based on the NPF rule.
For processing I used Siril and a lot of tutorials. I stacked the frames (minus flats because it didn’t like the ones I took), then ran background extraction, plate solved colour calibration, and then I removed the stars with starnet.
I stretched the nebula using the generalised hyperbolic transform (I wanted to learn it, so far only used the others) and was happy with the results I got! My main trick was to do just enough stretching and reset the black point at each step, being careful about clipping. I then readded the stars at the level that I found aesthetic
I don’t know too much yet, this was my 2nd astro project at all, but I really loved it!
I just got a star adventurer 2i and the next clear night will have me doing Andromeda