Utah Astrophotography
Orion, Running Man, Horsehead, and Flame Nebula
It was mostly cloudy this weekend so I didn't get much of a chance to add to the Orion images, I went out and tried shooting at a place I thought would make a good winter shooting location based on light pollution maps (easy access, supposedly bortle 3), turned out not so great, guess I'll have to keep searching. I also changed up my setup a little bit, opened up the legs on my tripod and hung a 20 pound dumbbell under it for better stability, now it's rock solid. I tried shooting 5 minute exposures with my D7000 and Samyang 135mm lens, it seems like I can get to 5 minutes fairly consistently with not too many subs that have to be thrown out (keeper rate of about 75% I'd guess), but once I go above 5 minute exposures the keeper rate drops down to probably 30%. The periodic error (?) of the mount is 10 minutes from what I've read so I guess once you get up to that length of exposure you are running into mount limitations. I'm thinking of buying a guidescope and camera and trying out some guiding with the mount to see if I can improve the keeper rate, I'd really love to take some super long exposures (like 10 minutes) to really bring out the dust around this area as well.
So I ended up only getting another 6 subs out of all the ones I shot thanks to clouds and tracking error, I decided to go back and re-calibrate, register, and stack in PixInsight this time using the subframe selector script to weight the subs prior to registering/stacking. I also tried not going to wild on the post processing and just focusing on bringing out the dust without destroying the image with noise.
Orion, Running Man, Horsehead, and Flame Nebula
It was mostly cloudy this weekend so I didn't get much of a chance to add to the Orion images, I went out and tried shooting at a place I thought would make a good winter shooting location based on light pollution maps (easy access, supposedly bortle 3), turned out not so great, guess I'll have to keep searching. I also changed up my setup a little bit, opened up the legs on my tripod and hung a 20 pound dumbbell under it for better stability, now it's rock solid. I tried shooting 5 minute exposures with my D7000 and Samyang 135mm lens, it seems like I can get to 5 minutes fairly consistently with not too many subs that have to be thrown out (keeper rate of about 75% I'd guess), but once I go above 5 minute exposures the keeper rate drops down to probably 30%. The periodic error (?) of the mount is 10 minutes from what I've read so I guess once you get up to that length of exposure you are running into mount limitations. I'm thinking of buying a guidescope and camera and trying out some guiding with the mount to see if I can improve the keeper rate, I'd really love to take some super long exposures (like 10 minutes) to really bring out the dust around this area as well.
So I ended up only getting another 6 subs out of all the ones I shot thanks to clouds and tracking error, I decided to go back and re-calibrate, register, and stack in PixInsight this time using the subframe selector script to weight the subs prior to registering/stacking. I also tried not going to wild on the post processing and just focusing on bringing out the dust without destroying the image with noise.