Beginner stacking target

[tomf]

For the first time in years in somewhere with clear dark skies, my DSLR, and not on a rocking boat. I would like to play with stacking.

I have a 10.5 lens, a 70 and a 105 and I'm in France

What do you think I should try photographing?

[Green Baron]

Good idea :-)

Les étoiles. The sky.

Do you have a normal tripod or a tracking mount ? If the first, then you'll be "limited" to the wide angle lenses and only a few seconds of exposure time or the stars will be trails. Which has its own charm. If you have a tracking mount then you are free to aim at whatever constellation you like. Orion starts to rise at this time of the year, it's girdle is one of the finest sights.

Rules: long exposure times (2min at aperture 4), low iso setting (max. 800 depending on quality of the camera) = more detail. You might want an external timer for your camera.

For stacking beginners i'd recommend the software deepskystacker. There's a plethora (and a chaos) of information on the web.

 

Before i exhaust myself, may i kindly ask that you visit the two threads on astrophotography, one here in Science & Spaceflight and the other in the Lounge ? Much has been discussed there. A very good well of information is the forum cloudynights.com.

cs

Edited October 10, 2017 by Green Baron

[GluttonyReaper]

I would also recommend Orion. Interesting to look at, and big enough that you can't really miss

That said, I've always been a fan of the 'point straight up and hope for the best' method. Might not always get any fancy nebula or anything like that, but the stars alone are beautiful enough  

[cubinator]

There's a magnitude 11 comet in Perseus right now, if you can get objects that dim.

[tomf]

Only a pretty basic tripod I'm afraid

[YNM]

If you're only having a basic non-tracking tripod and DSLR, I don't think you can do "stacking". It'd just be standard long exposure.

 

If you still want to try though, I recommend trying getting some "easy" constellation (like, dunno, dippers ?). I thought Pleiades but apparently the Moon is going to blare through there.

[Oiff]

Without a tracking mount your options are limited but you can still take some good pictures.

 

Using the shortest focal length lens will allow you to take longer exposures, these can then be stacked in DSS for some widefield images that should show the Milky Way.

You will need to experiment with how long an exposure you can take before you get star trails, this depends on the focal length of the lens, the pixel size of the camera and the part of the sky you are pointing it at.

 

You can also do star trails, point the camera North and take long exposure, you will see arcs around Polaris.

 

The moon is also doable as it is so bright.

You can either take still images or video, the video can be processed in Autostakkert! which determines which frames are best and stacks them together.  Post processing in registax will then bring out the detail.

 

If you want to take long exposures but don’t want to shell out on a tracking mount then google “barn door mount”, this is easily built and allows you to take long exposures by countering the earths rotation with mount rotation.

 

One thing to be wary of is the aperture, it can be tempting to fully open up to f1.2 or whatever your lens goes down to but doing so will make it nigh on impossible to focus and will also make any optical aberrations worse giving warp speed effects to the stars.  I’ve found my DSLR lenses work best between f3 and f5.