Schroedinger's Dog
Posts: 1692 Joined: Jan. 2009
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I'll take the liberty of pasting here a PM I sent to Lou quite a while ago about astronomic photography with a numeric camera.
Any and all corrections are welcome:
Quote | All you need is your digicam, a stable stand, Photoshop, and a clear night sky.
You will have to set the apperture time of your cam to something akin to a normal low-light shooting (sadly I don't have the exact ms timing, but a few tests should let you figure it out). If the exposure time is too long, you'll get weird artefacts due to the Earth rotation, which the stand doesn't compensate.
Choose a patch of sky you'd like to imortalise, and start shooting. A remote would be better than actually pushing the button every time. That way you are sure your cam will be aligned 100% of the time.
Take as many pics as you want (usually 10 is enough).
Now, open these 10 (or more) pics in Photoshop (or any other software that works with layer). That's the tricky part. The bottom layer (ie. first pic) will be 100% opacity. all other pics will be added on a new layer, with oppacity decreasing by 10% for each new layer. So if you took 20 pics, it will decrease by 5%, but you should know that, Mr PhD
Take any single star or body from the bottom-layer pic, and use it to align all the pics, thus compensating Earth's rotation.
You should come up with amazing images. My favorite, when I used to work on this, was the Milky Way, but Andromeda gives great results as well.
Everything is in the setting of your exposure time, so a few trials and errors are nescessary.
Hope this help, and if it does, please share your pics |
-------------- "Hail is made out of water? Are you really that stupid?" Joe G
"I have a better suggestion, Kris. How about a game of hide and go fuck yourself instead." Louis
"The reason people use a crucifix against vampires is that vampires are allergic to bullshit" Richard Pryor
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