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[Bryant]

I finally had the opportunity of borrowing one of my friends' digital cameras and trying it out for astronomy purposes. I'm not sure of the exact model or anything, it's nothing fancy, but it served to take some of these pictures. This was my first time ever using any manual settings or playing around with any of that, and I'll say it worked out quite well. The moon shots were taken on May 23rd and the constellations a bit before that, I've just been out of town and too busy to post them. Please send thoughts and comments/criticism

The moon shots are taken through my 8" dob, this first one is through a 15mm

This is the wider shot, through my all-purpose 25mm

Both of these shots were taken on a really ad-hoc tripod I made for the camera with some wood attached to a really old tripod from a telescope I had as a kid. Both are 30 second exposures.

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Brain,

Outstanding, and you say 1st attempt? I'm impressed!...

You must share with us the details on the images...

What type of camera did you use,

Exposure and time settings

Hand held?

Stuff like that.

Also...

The graphic artist in me couldn't resist in tweaking your gorgeous Lunar shot just a tad:

I sharpened and added some contrast...I hope you don't mind... #drool#

Good catches on the Big & Little dippers.

Keep them coming, they are quite cool.

[Bryant]

Ok, well I'm gonna tell what I can about the pictures, I didn't exactly write everything down at the time but...

They were all taken through a Sony DSC-P93 digital camera

The moon shots, I can't remember the exposures.. I'm thinking around 1/15th of a second or thereabouts. Both of those were taken hand held because I really don't have anything better!

The big and little dippers are both 30 second exposures on ISO 400, mounted on basically a piece of wood attached to a tripod so that I could point the camera wherever in the sky.

Looking over the big dipper shot again, the original that is (you can see many more stars in that one) I'm pretty sure I managed to get a very faint glimpse of M51!

And let me add, great touch up job on my photos! I'm really no whiz with image editing, and didn't even edit the moon shots. The constellations I felt having a dark sky was better than having it all red after the long exposure Any suggestions on good editing techniques?

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Bryant,

First, take your astro shots in the tungsten lighting setting. It cuts thru the orange muck very well.

I use PhotoImpact as my graphics editing program. Easy, robust and serves me well for years.

When post processing, don't go overboard. Small minute changes at a time is the way to go. Sharpening just slightly. Too much and it looks un-natural. I also use a free progran called Noiseware Community edition. It does wonders in removing the noise digital cameras include in low light images. Can't recommend it enough.

Most digital sub-dSLR cameras only have a 15 sec max exposure. Your's has a 30 sec? Very cool!

On the wide field shots, how are you keeping the stars as pin points and not getting trails? It's gotta be a short exposure or very high ISO.

[Bryant]

Thanks for the tips! I'll have to check out those programs...

As for the star trails, I really don't know why they didn't appear. I expected some (not too large) to appear with a 30 second exposure, but out of the dozen or so pictures I took there were none. As far as I know, ISO 400 is not that high, because as I read about other digital cameras and I saw some go up to crazy things like ISO 1600. As I said, there was absolutely no tracking involved, so I don't really know how they came out so well.. but I'm glad they did