Tag: astrophotography

¿Por qué dormir en un hotel de cinco estrellas si puedes dormir bajo millones de estrellas?

/ Carsten / 3 Comments
2017_03_25-tent_milkyway1_border_web_qual_small

This image of the Milky Way has been recorded in a clear, cold night not so far away from Roque de Los Muchachos on La Palma. It has been recorded with an EOS6D in combination with a Rokinon 14mm/f2.8 fast lens. The exposure time was 20s with ISO6400. A darkframe has been subtracted later on. The RAW file has been developed using rawtherapee. For correction of vignetting and perspective a lens correction profile from this website has been used (btw. thanks for providing this profile!).

The image is also available in full resolution (3.1MB).

Last updated: June 9, 2022 at 22:10 pm

A new star-gazing location on the west side of La Palma

/ Carsten / Leave a comment
small.telescope2

Since the last astro-tour the moon still has left the scene. However, unfortunately Mirador del Jable and Mirador Llano de Las Ventas are covered in clouds and there is quite some wind up there. I am happy that hdmeteo tells me that in advance. Luckily, it also tells me that the west-side of La Palma looks pretty good for tonight. I just have no idea where exactly I should drive to with my equipment. It should be a quiet place with no wind and no traffic but it should still be reachable by car…

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First time astrophotography on La Palma with my own equipment – failed

/ Carsten / 1 Comment
Astrophotography on La Palma

Astrophotography on La Palma

Weather forecast - Clear sky on La Palma.

Well… I like the moon… but… YEAH! He is gone! Time for astrophotography on La Palma 🙂 For this purpose I rent a VW Caddy here on La Palma. The plan: Put all the equipment and my girlfriend into the Caddy and drive up to Mirador del Jable – a quite popular place for watching the stars. One last look at the weather forecast from aemet… Looks quite promising! Even though it is almost impossible to predict the weather on La Palma. Furthermore, hdmeteo can be helpful to get an idea of the current weather conditions on the island. And last but not least the NOT webcam can give another impression. The decision has been made – tonight will be astro-night!

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The Great Orion Nebula from La Palma

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The Great Orion Nebula (M42) - 2017/02/02

Recently I took this image of the Great Orion Nebula from La Palma / Spain. Actually it was just a test of my equipment. I did not align the mount and hence the guiding was miserable. I only took some frames with the IR filter with different exposure times. Still, in the end the result was much better than I expected. I love the La Palma sky! 🙂 The image is also available in full resolution here.

Date2017/02/02
LocationLa Palma / Spain
ObjectThe Great Orion Nebula
CameraAtik383L+
Guidingyes, QHY5-II Mono via OAG
Telescope8" GSO Newtonian
Barlow lensnone
MountEQ6Syntrek
Cooling0°C
Luminance4x 5s, 7x 15s, 9x 75s, 7x 150s, 5x 300s, 2x 600s, all bin: 1x1
Red-
Green-
Blue-
Dark-
Flat10x
Total exposure~1h15m

Clear skies!

Last updated: June 16, 2022 at 13:20 pm

Milkyway photography with the X-T1 and stacking with DeepSkyStacker

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In this post I want to show a way of Milkyway image processing which does not require any commercial software product. The idea is to use rawtherapee, DeepSkyStacker and GIMP to develop, align and combine the frames to one final image.

Milkyway -from La Palma / Spain - 2016/06/01

Camera: Fujifilm X-T1, Exposure time: 25sec. per frame, ISO: 1250, Aperture: f/2.8, focal length: 18mm

The problem

Quite often it is advantageous to use a high ISO value to get as much details as possible in the available exposure time (before the earth rotation becomes visible). On the other hand one probably does not want too much noise in the image. Therefore, the idea is to take multiple frames at a high ISO value and stack them later to reduce the noise. There is just one problem: The earth rotates and from frame to frame the stars are in different positions. Therefore an alignment of the frames before averaging is required. But then we get another problem: The foreground of each frame moves and so the resulting foreground gets fuzzy in the end. What to do?

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