Orion and the Running Man

[Colorado CJ]

Thanks everyone.

I woke up this morning at 5 am to shoot Orion. Here is a 9 shot stack using 40 second exposures and an old Soviet Tair 3 300mm lens.

This is getting fun! I need to take the time and shoot many more images so I can get cleaner, more detailed results.

Orion and Running Man by Andrew Marjama, on Flickr

 

[Ben Egbert]

Ok, I assume you are tracking and shooting all 9 shots while steady on the feature. Then you stack and align. Do you use dark frames? NR?

What is the aperture of the 300MM lens? How do you focus? How do you find your subject?

Great work here, I am impressed.

 

[lionking]

Beautiful.

 

[AlanLichty]

Incredible - are you still shooting these from your back yard?

 

[Colorado CJ]

Ok, I assume you are tracking and shooting all 9 shots while steady on the feature. Then you stack and align. Do you use dark frames? NR?

What is the aperture of the 300MM lens? How do you focus? How do you find your subject?

Great work here, I am impressed.

Thanks! All were shot on just a tripod and using the built in "Astrotracer" feature that comes with Pentax cameras which track the earths rotation and uses the sensor stabilizer to follow the stars.

I am using a trial version of Astro Pixel Processor to stack them and yes, I am using darks and flats to take the noise out. I am not doing any internal noise reduction in the camera though, I have that turned off.

The lens is an old soviet lens used on the Photosniper setup, it is a great lens but very heavy. I am shooting it wide open at f4.5. I am just focused to infinity.

Orion is easy to see, but to help find Andromeda I used a Android App called "Mobile Observatory". It is a great app that lets you point your phone at the sky and it uses the phones sensors to know what stars/nebula/etc you are pointing at. It is an awesome tool and really brings a lot to backyard astronomy. The old star atlases were nice, but this app is much more informational and easier to use.

Beautiful.

Thanks!

Incredible - are you still shooting these from your back yard?

Thank you. Yeah, still in the back yard. The moon was set so it was much darker than when I was shooting Andromeda.

 

[JimFox]

Awesome work Andrew! You are really starting to get this nailed down.

 

[Colorado CJ]

Thanks Jim, but I have a lot to learn yet. Patience is one of them. I can wait for hours as I sneak up on a herd of elk, but after 15 minutes of standing in the dark I am anxious to get inside and see what I captured.

It is probably because it's new to me. If I can get more exposures to stack, the images will be much better. I also want to try out some Pentax A* 645 glass I have.

 

[Mike Lewis]

truly wonderful results with the Astrotracer function! I think if you start adding dark frames, and getting more subframes, you will continue to see improvement. M42 is very bright, and is a good starting target, but has such a large dynamic range that you may find eventually you want to expose at least 2 stacks at different exposure lengths, and then combine them in an HDR type treatment, to allow for showing the fainter outer cloud detail without having the very bright Trapezium inner core totally blown out.

Keep up the good work!

ML