Photographing Orion using a 50mm lens

[jsecordphoto]

Photographing and Processing the Constellation Orion: Astrophotography Image Stacking and LRGB Processing – Lonely Speck

So I saw this guide that was posted on Petapixel and Fstoppers last week, that looked amazing and gave me an excuse to go photograph the night sky in the "off season" (non milky way). Last night, the new moon, was perfectly clear (and cold at around 0 degrees), so my buddy and I went out to a nearby dark spot to try it out. In the guide Ian uses an A7s at iso25,600 f2 for 4 seconds, I went with iso12,800 f2 and 8 seconds using my nikon 50mm 1.8.

I was honestly pretty surprised on how much detail was visible just on my camera's screen around Orion with an 8 second exposure. I followed his tutorial pretty closely, and it was definitely fun trying something new, but he got FAR more detail than I did. Not sure why but it was still cool to try out.

 

[qleak]

From the tutorial linked in OP.

DarkSiteFinder.com

Very cool light pollution maps. Thanks for sharing

 

[jsecordphoto]

Yeah I've used those light pollution maps before. They can be good for planning, now I pretty much just look on google earth at potential locations, check out the topography and distance to any nearby towns and go from there.

 

[pgriz]

Very nice. ISO 12,800 together with the sensor of the D750 is a very powerful combination. This is one place where the capabilities of my Canon T1i show their age.

 

[jsecordphoto]

Very nice. ISO 12,800 together with the sensor of the D750 is a very powerful combination. This is one place where the capabilities of my Canon T1i show their age.

Thanks! I kind of wish I had pushed the iso even higher, because even at 12,800 the raw files were pretty clean and I even skipped taking dark frames. Definitely going to be a great camera for milky way season!

 

[astroNikon]

I definitely prefer my d600 FF high ISO for astrophotography to my d7000 (which was the king of crops at one time and still really good) !

 

[KmH]

Apparently Ian got more detail because he stacked a series of 64 images:

I recommend shooting a collection of multiple images, anywhere between 32 and 64 frames is usually plenty. This is where an intervalometer is helpful: you can just set it to make the camera take all of the photos automatically. Be sure to take into account the extra processing time for long exposure noise reduction if you have it enabled. Either way, I recommend shooting the constellation for a minimum of about 10-20 minutes. If you have an intervalometer, it’s a good time to sit back, relax and look for shooting stars.

The more frames we capture, the more total signal and the cleaner the appearance of the final stacked image. Once again, it’s OK if your individual images are noisy because the stacking process will help reduce that noise.

Here’s an example of a straight-out-of-camera single frame from a total of 64 frames that I photographed for my example image of Orion. You can see that there is quite a bit of orange glow from light pollution, the image is mildly noisy and there is only a limited amount of nebulosity detail visible. Expect your image to look rather dull straight out of the camera too.

 

[jsecordphoto]

Apparently Ian got more detail because he stacked a series of 64 images:

I cant remember where he mentioned it, maybe in the video or in the multiple places he shared the tutorial, but I'm pretty sure he said he ended up only using 30 frames. He might've just used 30 for the video to make it a little faster, who knows. If we get another clear night soon, I might go back out and try at a higher iso and see if I can get some more detail.

 

[ruifo]

Photographing and Processing the Constellation Orion: Astrophotography Image Stacking and LRGB Processing – Lonely Speck

So I saw this guide that was posted on Petapixel and Fstoppers last week, that looked amazing and gave me an excuse to go photograph the night sky in the "off season" (non milky way). Last night, the new moon, was perfectly clear (and cold at around 0 degrees), so my buddy and I went out to a nearby dark spot to try it out. In the guide Ian uses an A7s at iso25,600 f2 for 4 seconds, I went with iso12,800 f2 and 8 seconds using my nikon 50mm 1.8.

I was honestly pretty surprised on how much detail was visible just on my camera's screen around Orion with an 8 second exposure. I followed his tutorial pretty closely, and it was definitely fun trying something new, but he got FAR more detail than I did. Not sure why but it was still cool to try out.

View attachment 93781

Well done!!

I'm also surprised with the detail out of my Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AI-S, at f/2, for astro-photography. It catches some distant galaxies so easy, that other lenses have a hard time without a guiding system.

Here some of my amateour astro shots:
Astrophotography - an album on Flickr