My first "fieldpicture"

Taken with my only camera atm: Olympus u-mini 5.0 Megapixel
Set it to Nightscene, ISO 400 (max) and mounted on the back of my telescope at a right angle and zoomed in 2x (max) from my balcony this morning at 06:20-06:40.
I could only see one star at that time because of sun on the way up.
-1-0 degrees celcius outside I took rougly 60-70 images over 20 minutes manually (felt like 2 hours). Stacked them (first time on deep sky stacker).
The star I now believe was Vega and the constallation Lyra.



Merry christmas Ireland.

Yes, that's Vega, given away by the "double-double" Epsilon Lyra to the bottom left.

It's a great start in astrophotography, well done, and welcome to the IFAS board - you must be our most northerly corrspondent!

Well done obbas, you're on your way to astrophotography addiciton, even if (for the time being) it is only through projection! As Paul said, you've got all the main stars in your shot. Even the Double Double. If you persevere and take more images, you'd get a brighter image when stacked. It's a pain, I know, but worth the attempt if it gets you a brighter image, with maybe even some colour definition (Vega is bright blue naturally, for example).

Keep looking up!

Seanie.

I had to haste off to work, used up my entire 3 hour lunchbreak to stack the image.
I then remembered that I forgot to "enhance" the image, I can brighten it up a fair bit I think, and also adjust the colors.
Just have to learn how.
I'm totally new to photography and editing images and stuff.
I can also say that I felt the sting of addiction when I walked back to work, couldn't wait for the evening, they said there would be ok weather, but I had to fix my shower so I used up all the time.

The reason I'm so exited about this is because it's been no clear view of the sky from my balcony for over a month and I've been reading about astrophotography 24/7 during that time.
And I almost bought myself a Canon EOS 400D but now I feel I can use this camera at least a few days/weeks to get the basics.

Been all over the web for a good astro forum and I find this one the most interesting.
Will try to produce a better version of this image.

With "embedded adjustments". :roll:

Btw, a plane is visible on some of the frames. Lucky it flew by to spice it up.


How important are the darkframes?
What is the offset and the flat?

How important are the darkframes?
What is the offset and the flat?

Obbas, the offset(bias) frames are not all that important as they just remove some very low level noise from the image. Darkframes will help a lot with an image from a camera where the sensor is not cooled. Did you notice how when you stretched the image you could see a lot of background noise (red and blue) in this image. Well by applying dark frames you reduce this significantly and as such are able to stretch it even more without the background looking too noisy.

BTW that is a great first effort. I wish you a long and happy addiction to astrophotography.

Thank you. I'm going to buy a Hama Star 61 tripod today, I think. Probably easier to use than my gargantuan telescope+mount.
Is it an ok tripod for the low cost?