Astrophoto thread (your own photos please)

[george7378]

Hi everyone,

I used my Lumix to get these - my first landscape photos. The stars were taken with 60 second photos, and the foregrounds with 1/4 second with flash. I'm pleased to have got M31 and the double cluster with the telescope one:

 

[Messierhunter]

A compilation video of some of the objects I've been shooting lately with my new Samsung SDC-435:

 

[McWgogs]

Sunspot 1108 from today.

 

[RisingFury]

Wow! Amazing shot!

 

[george7378]

That really is an amazing photo!

 

[McWgogs]

Thanks, that's over a hundred stacked.
I've had very good seeing today.

 

[george7378]

I got some photos of the Moon last night - the clouds produced a subtle rainbow halo when they were in front of it. Jupiter was close by, and the bright Moon lit up the landscape. I also saw Orion fully above the horizon early this morning, and the Moon was lower down as day broke. The de-focused photo shows the colour of the halo best:

 

[astrosammy]

:thumbup: Must be great to have a camera with such long exposure times. The maximum I can get with my camera are 8 seconds.

 

[george7378]

:thumbup: Must be great to have a camera with such long exposure times. The maximum I can get with my camera are 8 seconds.

I bought it because it can do shots up to 60 seconds. This was a reasonably cheap camera - about £150, which is much cheaper than any DSLR, proving that you don't need to spend that much to get long exposures. 8 seconds should also be more than sufficient to get stars and constellations, especially if you stack the images in a program like GIMP. That's usually what I do - I take one image, and if it's too dark, I open the same image as a new layer in GIMP, and press addition in the layers panel, and it doubles the brightness, almost as if the exposure time was doubled. It is really worth a go.

Have you taken any photos with your camera? I could try and see if GIMP will brighten them up.

 

[astrosammy]

Here's an example with 8 seconds exposure. The downside is that ISO can't be changed manually. When weather gets better I'll try some stacking.

 

[Yoda]

Here's a series of Jupiter shots from this past week.

 

[george7378]

Here's an example with 8 seconds exposure. The downside is that ISO can't be changed manually. When weather gets better I'll try some stacking.

Here is the result of stacking it twice - it is not a major difference, but you can see what happens:

 

[McWgogs]

That jupiter looks great Yoda, i can't wait to catch the red spot and a transit. I would yesterday but the clouds came
Here's jupiter from two days ago, best to date. That's Callisto on the left and Io on the right.

And the full moon from the same night, a mosaic of 7 pictures, each being 12 stacked photos:

 

[Yoda]

Nice images McWgogs !!

What Scope and camera are you using ?

 

[McWgogs]

Orion SkyQuest XT8, dobsonian telescope, and a Panasonic DMC-FZ8 camera.
That jupiter is around 80 stacked images with the 25mm eyepiece that came with the scope, and it was zoomed in about 6x by the camera.

 

[george7378]

Orion SkyQuest XT8, dobsonian telescope, and a Panasonic DMC-FZ8 camera.
That jupiter is around 80 stacked images with the 25mm eyepiece that came with the scope, and it was zoomed in about 6x by the camera.

Your Jupiter is very detailed - I have a Lumix DMC-ZX1 and a Sky-Watcher 130. How do you go about taking the frames and processing them? I use the HD video recorder and Registax.

 

[astrosammy]

Here is the result of stacking it twice - it is not a major difference, but you can see what happens:

Thank you for testing it! There seem to be some gaps in the clouds, so I'll try to get some images later today.

 

[Yoda]

Another night, another chance of imaging Jupiter !
Nice image of the Great (and smaller) Red-spot.

 

[McWgogs]

Your Jupiter is very detailed - I have a Lumix DMC-ZX1 and a Sky-Watcher 130. How do you go about taking the frames and processing them? I use the HD video recorder and Registax.

I use the unlimited burst shooting mode, taking about 20 pictures in a row with iso100 smallest F and whatever shutter speed will keep Jupiter nice and bright.
This time I've used paint shop's unsharp mask to brign out the details in the raw photos and processed them in Registax.
Of course good seeing conditions, a collimated scope and setting the focus as best as possible will greatly improve sharpness. I use www.meteoblue.com for seeing pretictions.

 

[Messierhunter]

Here's a 1.5 hour time lapse of Jupiter with an Io transit. Each frame is a stacked image from a 1 minute video recorded with a modified Samsung SDC-435 and 8" LX200 with a 2x barlow: