Astrophotography

[botty1963]

I've never done any photos of the night-sky other than photos of the Northern Lights in Iceland a few months ago which I posted about on here.

So having seen so many great photos of the milky-way with excellently lit foreground interest I wondered how that could be done, and as I expected it all 'appears' to be clever editing with multiple images merged. It all makes sense as if not, how could you get a lit foreground so sharp and well exposed, and also the stars.

I was wondering however if it all has to be done at the editing stage, so, if I wanted to try it will I have to learn how to use my editing software, which I rarely use to be honest.

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Steve,

Have you had a read of some of the more relevant results from our CiC Tag Cloud for astrophotography?

They may get you started, but if this thread attracts new replies of significant helpfulness, I'll add this thread to that list.

Cheers, Dave

[James G]

Steve,
simple answer first... you can take pretty good night shots of star fields, the Orion Nebula etc which will give you surprisingly good images 'sooc'!

You can also take very good images of the moon sooc ,which would require minimum pp.

In truth though, the more complicated answer is that if you want to produce the kind of images often shown in magazines etc you will need to post process and possibly acquire some specialist software to handle multiple image registration and stacking.

Software like DeepSky stacker and registax is free and resolves, (within certain limits) issues associated with not having a specialist motorised mount to facilitate long exposures. (There are some good YouTube tutorials that show how to get started!)

If, for instance, you would like to try photographing Orion (and the nebula) try this thread....

Never thought I could shoot these images

otherwise, as Dave as already posted, there are a considerable number of threads on this forum tagged as Astrophotography which you will find useful.

[Donald]

Before reading Dave's response, I'd already put an 'astrophotography' tag on this thread. Even ss it stands now, I think it would be helpful for anyone else researching the topic.

[mknittle]

Before reading Dave's response, I'd already put an 'astrophotography' tag on this thread. Even ss it stands now, I think it would be helpful for anyone else researching the topic.

Thanks Donald.

[botty1963]

Many thanks folks, extremely helpful. I am off to North Wales next Friday for a week and stopping in a cottage with lovely views of the hills so hoping for some clear nights to get in some practice.