Astrophotography

[Holg3107]

Anybody else dabble in astrophotography? I picked up a Rokinon 2.8/14mm for this and am giving it a go while I'm living here in South America. Lets start with these [2] and Ill add more later, just getting started so any tips are always helpful! These were taken at f2.8 around 25 seconds I believe.

[Blacktail Sniper]

Very cool!!  Looking forward to more.

[Fl0und3rz]

Cool photos!  Can you tell us more about what we are looking at? 

[DanielLee5]

Amazing pics, go on sharing!

[branches]

Nice pictures. Thank you for posting them. Hope to see some more.

[Holg3107]

My second attempt. Hiked out to a lake here called Lago Escondido (Hidden Lake) as we have clear skies and no moon so I took the opportunity to take some photos. The first pic is my first attempt at a Panoramic. Its 12 photos stitched together. The rest I messed around with a little light painting etc...

All photos were taken with a 30 second shutter speed, F2.8 ISO 800 on a Rokinon 14mm 2.8

[Boss .300 winmag]

Nice. 

Any idea of what those celestial groups are called?

[Holg3107]

Heres a bit of an idea of whats going on in the largest cluster that you can see from Stellarium. Saturn is the easiest to pick out in the photos, as well as Antares.

[boneaddict]

Its on my bucket list, neat shots so far

[h2ofowlr]

Great shots. 

[fishnfur]

Nice work.  I like your Milky Way shots.

I used to do some astrophotography in a past life.  I have a couple of pouches of photos packed away somewhere.  I used a celestron 8 inch Schmit Cassegrain telescope with a 35mm Pentax camera body mounted where the telescope eyepiece would normally go.  I'd use a lighted reticle that came out the side of the camera mount to use a single star to guide the scope, or make corrections for malalignment of the scope and motor fluctuations during the photo.  Deep space objects like nebulae typically used to take about 45 minutes of exposure, all the time with your eye glued to the reticle eyepiece so that the photo didn't get blurred.  I had a homemade counterweight to offset the weight of the camera, but I ended up burning out the telescope motor twice while I was living in Italy.  That finally ended my fun. 

Planets were a lot easier.  I think the exposures were more like 20 seconds or so.  Mars and Jupiter were a lot of fun to take photos of.  Saturn very difficult to get anything worthwhile.  Now days, they have ccd cameras that are a lot easier to work with in the field, and photo enhancement is quickly completed.

[Holg3107]

Thanks Fishnfur! Would love to see some of your shots of more deep space objects! Currently I am really only set up for basic milky way / wide angle stuff. Like any new hobby it can open up a real can of worms as far as gear and costs associated go.