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

  • enbipanic@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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    3 days ago

    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