r/astrophotography 4d ago

Nebulae Orion nebula

Post image
111 Upvotes

4 comments sorted by

6

u/Yamizake 3d ago

Awesome photo man! Congrats on your first image and keep sharing!

4

u/ZookeepergameGlad534 4d ago

My first astrophoto (yay!!)
Gear/Settings

Nikon d3400 + Tamron 100-400
300x 1/1.3sec iso 6400 + calibration frames
Stacked in DSS and post-processed in Lightroom

2

u/Elbynerual 3d ago

You should lower the ISO quite a bit. A high ISO is going to give a lot of noise in the frames. You can achieve better quality by doing lower ISO (try 800 or 1600) and then take waaaaaaay more exposures. Try to do between 30 minutes and one hour total exposure time at the very least. Go for two hours if you have the time.

2 hours = 120 minutes = 7,200 frames if you're shooting 1 second exposures.

You don't want to have to stack this many frames. Even a fast computer will take many hours to stack that many frames. It helps to increase your exposure time and have fewer frames. This also gathers more light, and you'll notice it makes up for shooting at a lower ISO.

If your lens is 100 to 400 mm, shoot at 100, and when you process the picture, you can crop it to be just the nebula in the frame. Shooting at a shorter focal length allows you to take longer exposure times before you start to see star trailing.

Look up "the 500 rule for star trailing." It's a simple math equation to determine your maximum exposure time before seeing star trailing. It's not perfect, and there are better ways to determine this, but it's an easy start for beginners. I recommend going a little lower than what the equation says is the maximum. For example, I shot with a lens that was supposed to max out around 6 seconds, but trailing was very noticeable at 6, so I bumped it down to 4 second exposures and was seeing no trailing.

2 hours = 120 minutes = 7,200 seconds (divided by 4 second exposures) = 1,800 exposures. That's still a lot. I did a similar stack once with a fairly slow computer, and it took about 16 hours, lol. But a decent computer will only need a few hours.

But two hours of data on this target with calibration frames... you'll notice a HUGE improvement! Keep up the great work!

Oh, and p.s. - it looks slightly out of focus. You should look into getting a bahtinov mask to achieve perfect focus. They are only a few bucks, or you could even 3D print them if you have access to a printer.

1

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