Orion the Hunter (Astrophotography)

[Cazzie]

The image you see is a composite of six images, each shot at f/13 (my Celestron C-8's fixed focal value) and on my Nikon D5500 using an ISO of 1600 with a setting for a timed exposure of 30-seconds for each image (I also used the 10-second self timer to shoot rather than click the camera and possibly cause shutter shake).


My quest for the night was the Constellation of Orion the Hunter, one of the most visible and known constellations in the night sky this time of year. And last night it was in a perfect position after the women's bike race I watched in Australia. The moon had not risen so I had a marvelous dark sky to the south.


The six images were all stitched into one composite image using Microsoft ICE (Image Composite Editor), which is free by the way, possibly the best panorama composite editor out there too, better than Photoshop's in my opinion.
After working up the single image, I cropped the image to only expose Orion and brought the image into Photoshop CS for post-processing. Here I adjusted color, tone, and contrast, plus I removed JPEG artifacts and digital noise using Photoshop's neutral filters. I did not used a star-filter either, the star tracks from the brighter stars are a natural phenomena for long exposures.

Cazzie

[huub vink]

A Nikon D5500 is perhaps not the James Webb Space Telescope, but very nicely done Caz. :encouragement:

Cheers,
Huub

[KC013]

Nice! My home constellation. (LOL, a very long story born in a bar quite some time ago!):biggrin-new:

[Josh Patterson]

Great shot of the nebula on his sword! It has been cloudy up here all month and I've been dying to see if I can even spot C/2022 E3. It would be only my third in 47 years after Hyakutake (My first and what a first one it was! I do have one great exposure of it from a 36 exposure roll.) and Neowise. (Which was cool to see but in my lifetime Hyakutake is probably going to be the gold standard! The tail was ENORMOUS!)

[Cazzie]

Great shot of the nebula on his sword! It has been cloudy up here all month and I've been dying to see if I can even spot C/2022 E3. It would be only my third in 47 years after Hyakutake (My first and what a first one it was! I do have one great exposure of it from a 36 exposure roll.) and Neowise. (Which was cool to see but in my lifetime Hyakutake is probably going to be the gold standard! The tail was ENORMOUS!)

The comet is getting slightly brighter, but I still do not think it will reach naked eye visibility. It is right at binocular visibility now at magnitude +9.5. The gas trail is getting longer and the dust trail is fanning out more. I took this shot using my Celestron C-8 and a Celestron NEXIMAGE 5 webcam around Christmas. The image is small because the little webcam only does a 640 X 480 image. I took 300 images in the cam and stacked them using a program called RegiStax and merged the best of the images into one image, which was post-processed in Photoshop CS. I hope to shoot a larger shot with my scope and Nikon D5500 when we have a start party next week with the new moon so that we'll have a very dark sky, clouds permitting.

Cazzie, starman.