My First Photos!

Would it be ok if I did a small amount of processing on the polaris image and put it back up here, just to see what I can get out of it?

Fire ahead Dave. I'd be interested to see what you could do.

Not sure I have a real goal Dave eile. I was into astronomy years ago, and always wanted to get into astro photograpy then but just didn't have the equipment. For the time being though, it would just be naked eye and not deep sky stuff.

For the time being.... If you get an interest in astrophotography, it can end up taking over And you thought aperture fever was bad...

Stick at it and keep us informed!

Cheers

Dave

Me too - I like the star trail shot, what ISO setting was it taken at?, as per Dave's advice, try and go to a reasonably dark site, and set up the camera on a tripod at say ISO 200, not that sensitive to light, if you set the ISO any higher, two things will happen - 1. too much light pollution will show up in your shot, this is the bain of shooting at night, stay away as best you can from lights! and 2. higher ISO setting means more of a drain on the battery - It's a shame when you take a 4 hour star trail exposure centered on polaris, only to find your battery went dead some time ago :evil:

Also the 'f' setting, around f3.5 is nice to get sharp stars, at 2.8 they may seem blurry a little, a higher f settings, you are allowing less and less light into the lens, darkening your picture.

Keep up the good work! Orion will be along soon, you'll get some good practice on those bright winter stars

Keith..

After about 4 minutes of processing in photoshop, this was how the image looked. A small bit of processing goes along way.


www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...943-polaris_mod1.jpg


www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...774-polaris_mod2.jpg

All of the skyglow is gone, if I pushed the levels more, many more star come out, but the image becomes alot more noiser, with abit more time, you'd probabily get more stars out of it.

One thing that is slightly more evident is that the camera is very slightly out of focus, this is very easy to get wrong in the canon, but with abit of experiance, you'll get the hang of that fairly quickly.

Fire ahead Dave. I'd be interested to see what you could do

I took a stab at the first polaris image also.

All I did was loaded the image in photoshop (some free limited 5.x version) created a copy of the image as another layer. Then did a strong 'gaussian blur' with a big pixel value to produce a very blurred image. Next combine the two images, with the blur set as a 'difference' layer. Crop the image to get rid of the roof. Then just to get the dark bits right, do an auto-levels, I set the background sky to be the black level. The dark bits wernt quite right though, so I tweaked it to look a bit better with the curve tool.

Though it does leave the stars as very 'rough' points. So do a very light blur, and then a light unsharp mask. That just takes the edge of the stars a bit and makes it look a little more natural.

Cheers,
~Al