Astroimages

I like these. How about some technical details. Telescope. Camera. Exposure. Etc. If I lived in a place with less light pollution I would like to have pursued this.

I can give you a basic run down of my gear.
The telescope used in most of those images is a Celestron C6-N which is a 6" F/5 reflector. The mount used to track the objects is a Celestron AVX. Mind you this is a entry level setup. I used my Nikon D7000 for the imaging camera for the deep space bodies. For the planetary I used a Celestron Neximage 5 for Saturn and a ZWO ASI224mc for Jupiter. Both of the planets was used with an 8" F/5 reflector.

Expsoure times for deep space objects vary with me depending on the brightness. I expose anywhere from 2-5 minutes per exposure. I will take about 20 - 40 exposures of each object. ISO is set between 800 - 1600. There are also several dark, bias and flat frames taken for calibration purposes. All this data then will be stacked to produce an image. You can use photoshop or your favorite editing program. I use a program called Star Tools for processing.

Then from Star Tools, I will take that image into Light room for cleaning things up a bit.

For planets I take videos instead of still shots. I take the video and stack the individual frames to create the composite. Sharpening is then applied.

You will definitely want to get the darkest skies that you can find. I travel just a little ways to get out of the city lights for my images. It definitely helps not having to deal with the light pollution and your images will improve greatly. Trying to do it in the city is rough. Not impossible though.

Fantastic. Thanks for the details. Very good results. From your handle it looks like you do amateur radio...something I did growing up.

Yes sir. Been licensed since 1983. lol

Great photos.

Do you have the astroimage conversion on the DSLR you use. I think it involves removing the glass over the sensor.

Brilliant pictures!