I was out at FLO last night. The viewing conditions were surprisingly good. I was showing my iOptron SkyTracker Pro to someone and decided to see how long of an exposure I could use and still have the stars as points rather than becoming little arcs. So, I set my timer at ten minutes and started the exposure.

I’m really happy with the result. You can clearly see the Andromeda Galaxy in the right half of the image and it appears that I caught a Perseid meteor almost in the centre of the frame.

The trees look kind of ghostly because the camera was tracking the stars, which causes the trees to appear to move in the image. Had I not been tracking the stars, the stars would look like arcs.

Here’s another image from the same outing that my previous Milky Way photo. This one is made up of 3 images of 5 minutes exposure, each and then some work in Photoshop. I knocked down the light pollution of Ottawa in the bottom left corner, but there’s still a bit “goo” to be dealt with.

I went out one evening last week and did some long exposures of the Milky Way galaxy using my Canon 70D on my iOptron Skytracker Pro. This is the result after stacking 4 images of 5 minutes exposure, each, and doing a bit of work on them in Photoshop. I’m fairly happy with the result, however I want to do a bit more to try any knock down the light pollution near the horizon.

I’m out in the cold shooting pictures of stars. This is one I pulled off the camera and edited on my iPhone using Photoshop Express.

Its a single 5 minute exposure using my iOptron Skytracker Pro.

Can’t wait to see how it turns out when I stack all the images later.

Yesterday evening was a beautiful evening to be out with a telescope. I decided to go after the Ring Nebula (M57), which was visible high in the sky.

This is an extract from one of the images I captured. The rest are being stacked as we speak.

I headed out yesterday evening to see what I could see. One of the things visible in the sky last night was the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). I put my camera on the back of the telescope and took a number of images. After aligning the images and working on them in Photoshop, I have an image where you can start to see some of the structure in the galaxy.

Andromeda galaxy (M31) (9 September 2017) © Gordon P. Dewis, 2017.

There’s specialized software for processing astrophotographs. For this image, I used one to figure out the image offset between the 8 images that went into it and then used Photoshop to manually align them. Then I converted the layers into a smart object, stacked them and applied some curves, exposure, level, and brightness/contrast adjustments.

For a first attempt, I’m happy with the results. I want to explore some of the other astrophotography software out there to see what works best for me.

I headed to Glendo State Park in Wyoming today to watch the eclipse with some friends. Here’s a quick photo of totality…