Calling all Astrophotographers, all skill levels. Post your work.

Nice telescope Serdgiam, you could do some afocal photography with it.

Orion Nebula
No tracker this time, 503 images stacked (ISO: 6400) - total exposure: 8 mm 23 s.
I had to give up the barndoor... till I get a motor for it. Adjusting by my hand wastes a lot of images. : P

Tamron 200mm

a reply to: Serdgiam

What mods are you thinking of, mounting? finder scope? camera?
What mount do you have?

a reply to: imitator

yeah bro, nice going! Looks like the lens is a keeper! Got some nice colors and diffraction spikes there, cool.
The barn door, lol, I've also broken my head on one of them, not so ideal the manual adjustment. It takes time and lots of practice and a decent PA to get ok tracking.
My first attempts were a LOT worse with the barn door.
Was wondering how much time does it take to register and stack 503 images?

Thanks for the feedback

I'm definitely thinking about some afocal photography, but ill be using a Panasonic Lumix ZS7. Its a decent enough camera for what it is, but perhaps not ideal. I may have access to a very nice.. Canon (?), I think, but don't want to rely on that.

As for mods I'm looking at right now: The equatorial mount is supposedly decent already, but some of the internals can use some tightening up. I won't know specifics until I get my hands on it and can print some stuff out. I know ill also be building a barn door tracker, as well as trying to print out some brackets to motorize the mount. I'm not sure what exactly is involved in the latter, doesn't seem too many are combining 3d printing and telescopes but, truthfully, I haven't looked too hard. Yet

originally posted by: intergalactic fire
Was wondering how much time does it take to register and stack 503 images?

A long long long time...

It took about 5 hours or more. I did it right before bedtime. During that time my computer is useless, it can't keep up with how fast I type...

a reply to: imitator

yeah _I thought so
That's another advantage of taking longer exposures, so you have less images to process.
For total expo of 4-5 hours it takes around 45 minutes in my case. Around 120-150sec expo/image.

I was browsing the other day and came up on a tracking mount which had a function to align without polaris, if you're interested i'll look that up again.

a reply to: Serdgiam

I think it's best you ask your questions on fora specific dedicated to astronomy and astrophotography.
It is not so unusual amateurs astro print their own upgrades so I'm sure you will find more answers and info there.

originally posted by: intergalactic fire
a reply to: imitator

yeah _I thought so

That's another advantage of taking longer exposures, so you have less images to process.
For total expo of 4-5 hours it takes around 45 minutes in my case. Around 120-150sec expo/image.

I was browsing the other day and came up on a tracking mount which had a function to align without polaris, if you're interested i'll look that up again.

Sounds great, send me a link or an email to that mount.... I've sent you a message through ATS, but I think it's not working properly, so it probably didn't go through.

Yeah, no view to Polaris is the reason I've blown off buying a tracker, though I could drive a few miles up the road and see it lol. Eventually...I plan on driving to certain locations to view and capture the Northern sky.

Took this one last night with a slight haze in the night sky.
Again waiting for the clouds to clear out... crazy weather. : P

Tamaron 200mm 500 images stacked.

Geminid Meteor Shower 18mm.


Rosette Nebula with a 50mm lens, cropped in and way over saturated. ; P

originally posted by: imitator
Geminid Meteor Shower 18mm.

Really like the Geminids one what are the exposure details

It's ok exif details still attached.

a reply to: imitator

Yes, really like the Geminid shot man, good catches!

Weather has been terrible here for astro. Yesterday finally some break in the clouds, did a 200min exposure of the Pleiades. When recovering the gear I noticed the whole camera and lens were full of waterdroplets.
Over 140min tossed away because of that.
Will try again tonight.

Yesternights Pleiades. Just wanted to see how it came out.
I will add more images from this night, camera is still rolling for almost 4 hours now. That will make almost 10 hours of total exposure.
It will be the first time stacking images from different days so I hope it will turn out good.

Info on the image;
200mm f4/ iso800
162 x 120sec
total 324min
50%crop

Wonderful images from all of you, thanks for continuing to post them here!

I've been having a rough time of it myself with having the time, weather, and equipment breaking down.

My only wide angle lens has become just about useless. It's a Canon 18-55mm EFS. Gears for focus have become stripped out, and while you normally do not use Auto Focus for star shots, the stripped gears have made trying to manually focus it darn near impossible, and the focus ring is so loose if you breath on it, it will go out of focus.

Back on the 13th I went outside anyways to see if I could get some meteor shots. Saw plenty, but captured none. Would have been blob city even if I had due to the bad focus:



Then the weather become rather cloudy and rainy. While waiting, I decided I would set up my tracking mount and use my 500mm lens to take some shots of the Pleiades. Weather finally turned good and I spent quite a long time getting the mount polar aligned, only to have my first 15 second test shot end up like this:



Turns out the batteries in my mount are dead. Sigh. So have to go to the store another day and get new batteries, only to have the weather go bad again.

Finally got a night in which the weather was not too bad, but there was a front moving in. Had just enough time to throw the camera on a tripod and take a few frames quickly (15 second shots at 1600 ISO). I actually got the 18-55mm lens to work for a few frames:



I'll be glad when I can get a new lens, and when I can have some nice, crystal clear weather.

Asteroid 2012 TC4 close approach to earth:

Yay! eriktheawful is back. You need to get that Orion AstroView up and running, knock those cob webs out. I've been thinking about getting one or at least something like it.

The last time I've seen clear skies was in early December. Last Friday I got a peak at the stars, though still cloudy. I did a little astro-photo time-lapse test.... I can see lots of space junk flying around. Tiangong-1 being one of them.... : P

www.youtube.com...



I'll clean up those hot pixels next time.

a reply to: imitator

Nice once you seen the hot pixels you tend to focus on them when watching the video.

Here's a photo I took of the Zuma launch during the boost back burn with my telescope. The interacting first and second stage plumes created a temporary man-made "nebula" in the sky.

It's been a bit quite here.
To spark things up, or not, here is a recent image I took of the flame and horsehead nebula.
50% crop of the full image.

a reply to: intergalactic fire

Any exposure details nice image