The Pleiades
My first attempt at deep-sky photography with the Pleiades.
Since I do not have proper astrophotography equipment, I set up my trusty DSLR with my longest lens with a large aperture (a 105 mm f/2.8 macro lens) and put it on a simple ball head on a tripod. Then I went to an area with low light pollution, pointed the camera at the Pleiades, and let it rip. I had to adjust the framing from time to time, as I did not use a tracker. As soon as I started getting cold and did not want to stand around anymore, I went home.
I loaded everything into #digiKam and sorted out all images where the camera had moved during the shot (which were too many). The remaining 177 shots were converted with #Siril to a FITS sequence, registered, and stacked. Another image did not survive the process, so the final image contains 176 photos (amounting to 5 minutes and 52 seconds of exposure time). After some image magic with Siril (green-channel denoising, asinh transformation, color calibration, etc.), I loaded the final image into #GIMP (including #GMIC) for cropping and contrasting, and then #Darktable for denoising and getting the final look.
The most difficult part? Getting the macro lens to focus at infinity... Thanks to the aforementioned amazing open-source projects, processing the images was relatively painless.
Nikon D500, Sigma 105mm EX DG OS HSM, 105 mm, f/2.8, 2 s, ISO 3200, tripod
#pleiades #astrophotography #photography #germany
My first attempt at deep-sky photography with the Pleiades.
Since I do not have proper astrophotography equipment, I set up my trusty DSLR with my longest lens with a large aperture (a 105 mm f/2.8 macro lens) and put it on a simple ball head on a tripod. Then I went to an area with low light pollution, pointed the camera at the Pleiades, and let it rip. I had to adjust the framing from time to time, as I did not use a tracker. As soon as I started getting cold and did not want to stand around anymore, I went home.
I loaded everything into #digiKam and sorted out all images where the camera had moved during the shot (which were too many). The remaining 177 shots were converted with #Siril to a FITS sequence, registered, and stacked. Another image did not survive the process, so the final image contains 176 photos (amounting to 5 minutes and 52 seconds of exposure time). After some image magic with Siril (green-channel denoising, asinh transformation, color calibration, etc.), I loaded the final image into #GIMP (including #GMIC) for cropping and contrasting, and then #Darktable for denoising and getting the final look.
The most difficult part? Getting the macro lens to focus at infinity... Thanks to the aforementioned amazing open-source projects, processing the images was relatively painless.
Nikon D500, Sigma 105mm EX DG OS HSM, 105 mm, f/2.8, 2 s, ISO 3200, tripod
#pleiades #astrophotography #photography #germany
Ricoh 500GS
Ilford HP5 plus
Rodinal
