Wide field astrophotography

As I found my enthusiasm on the rise with recent my success in capturing fair amount of detail of the Orion nebula using nothing but a tripod and a still camera, I got myself a fast 55mm lens that would capture even more detail.. or so, I had hoped. 

I could not wait for the moon to get into its waning phase again for me to try out the new lens. Played around a little with the focusing which is so hard to do with these miniature viewfinders set in neck-breaking angles to get the object in view.

After spending quite a bit of shots that were blurry out-of-focus, such as this one:

I decided to try to preview the picture taken in the camera itself, duh!

Turns out, this was good enough for me to get the right level of focus to try to get pin-pointed stars..

and so, I set the aperture to 1.8 and fired off, took some darks and a bias frame or two.

DeepSkyStacker to stack them and here is the final version:

As you can see, lot more detail but it still feels a bit over-exposed.

So, I have to wait another night to see if I can do better by stopping "up" a little or decreasing the exposure times to about a sec.

Will try both and update.. stay tuned.

Meanwhile, quite pleased with the lens, though there is quite a bit of vignetting seen near the edges, as expected.

Deep Sky Astrophotography

And so my journey into astrophotography continues with me wandering into different sites like this one. Amazed at the level of detail that can be captured merely using a tripod and inexpensive digital SLR camera, I tried my hand at various objects of the deep sky. One of the 1st things was to look toward the center of our galaxy in the direction of Sagittarius. Despite the light pollution, I could capture remarkable detail. Here below is the side-by-side picture comparison with Jerry Lodriguss' image of the same region.

Excited by the relative success of the simplicity of the approach, I decided to wait till the winter sky when Orion constellation would be high above the light polluted skies of Chennai.



Finally, after all the flooding damage and disruptions, got some clear skies.. last night (Dec. 17, 2015) I managed to take some pictures of the Great Orion Nebula. Here below is the cropped result of the region M42.

 Needless to say, I am impressed with the results.. It is a stack of 79 pictures of 2 sec. exposures @f5.6, ISO1600 zoomed in at about 120mm using a telephoto lens on Canon 350D (Rebel XT) and stacked using DeepSkyStacker.







And here is a full-frame with the belt of Orion clearly visible:

Belt-of-Orion, 135mm-79x2s-f5.6-ISO1600 (EOS 350D)

Prior to attempting to capture Orion, I attempted to capture Andromeda Galaxy - wasn't as great but on Oct 16, 2015, got a reasonably encouraging start..here is that image.

M31-Andromeda-200mm-12x4s-f5.6-ISO1600 (EOS 350D)