Post by starbux on Dec 15, 2006 3:54:39 GMT -6
It had been cloudy and raining for some days now. But during this time I experimented with things such as white-balance at the cloudy night sky. One nice thing I discovered is that setting the white-balance to "tungsten" or "incandescent" gets rid of the awful orange-brown hue that the light polluted night sky shows in unfiltered shots.
Tonight it cleared --- briefly. Taking hints from Rod Mollise's recent book "The Urban Astronomer's Guide" I chose to take it long and slow. 100 ISO and the aperture closed down to f/8 (no telescope, no filters). I tried 1 minute, 2 minutes, and 5 minutes (the maximum bulb on the Coolpix 5000). They were shot as RAW format. The 5 minute exposure seemed at first to be way overexposed --- most of the sky appeared white with few hints of stars. When I opened up the image in Photoshop (thankfully I didn't simply delete it beforehand), and adjusted the exposure adjustment down to it's minimum setting I was delighted to find that it had the best detail (and the least noise) of the shots.
So here it is -- Orion and Taurus. The camera was mounted directly to my EQ-2 mount with motorized tracking (a fairly quick set-up).
The eastern horizon is actually towards the left. Image was rotated for a more recognizable view.
Tonight it cleared --- briefly. Taking hints from Rod Mollise's recent book "The Urban Astronomer's Guide" I chose to take it long and slow. 100 ISO and the aperture closed down to f/8 (no telescope, no filters). I tried 1 minute, 2 minutes, and 5 minutes (the maximum bulb on the Coolpix 5000). They were shot as RAW format. The 5 minute exposure seemed at first to be way overexposed --- most of the sky appeared white with few hints of stars. When I opened up the image in Photoshop (thankfully I didn't simply delete it beforehand), and adjusted the exposure adjustment down to it's minimum setting I was delighted to find that it had the best detail (and the least noise) of the shots.
So here it is -- Orion and Taurus. The camera was mounted directly to my EQ-2 mount with motorized tracking (a fairly quick set-up).
The eastern horizon is actually towards the left. Image was rotated for a more recognizable view.
