Astrophotography is a passion. On a clear moonless night, when the sky is clear and you can see millions of stars spanning the entire sky, I sit in awe at its beauty. I feel so small and insignificant.
This is where my photography journey began. Since I was a child, I have loved looking up at the stars. As I got older, I started to get into astronomy. In my early 30’s I started to see fantastic images that people were able to capture with a DSLR attached to a telescope. I felt that this was something that I needed to try.
This is an image of the Rosette Nebula, NGC 2244. This was taken with a Canon EOS 1300D mounted to a Skywatcher 200P telescope and guided with an equatorial mount. This is not for the faint of heart. Astrophotography takes a lot of time a patience. To achieve this image, I took 12 exposures all at 5 minuet exposure time. My ISO set to 800. With this camera I find that if I go higher than 800 the image is too noisy, so I settle for a lower ISO and take longer exposures and more of them.
The next part of the Process is to take Dark and flat images with the same settings. So, to achieve dark images just put the lens cap back on and take several exposures. Then we need flats this is achieved by putting a white light over the end of the telescope and again taking several exposures with the same settings.
Next all the Coloured images, lights and flats are put into a bit of software that stacks all the images together to create the detail of the nebula. The Dark frames are used to cancel out any hot pixels that are on the image from the camera sensor. The flat images are used to reduce the vignette effect around the edge of the images.
Once this image has been stacked into a single image it can then be processed and cleaned up in photoshop
This is my favourite image. The Milky way and the Folly. Lets be real as much as it would be great to place my camera on a tripod and take a picture like that would be great and it is possible, but I took that about 5 miles from Cambridge and there is a lot of light pollution.
So, I have a star tracker to take long exposures for the detail in the moving sky. I set the camera up to capture the composition of the folly and I take a long exposure, 3 mins, ISO 800 F2.8. This was with a 24mm Sigma lens. I then adjust till I am happy with the composition. Then I turn the Tracker on and take about 10 X 3 min exposures, ISO 800 F2.8 for the sky. I then Stack the sky images as I did with, the nebula above and then combine this with the static image of the Folly. It’s a lot of work, but worth it for an image like this.
I do all this with a intervalometer attached to the camera so I don’t shake the camera in any way. This also gives me the chance to lay on the grass and stare up at the stars enjoying the peace and tranquillity.
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