It was taken with a Canon 6D + Tamron 600mm lens on a star adventurer tracker with some active guiding via a guidescope camera. Pretty basic setup for astrophotography :)
Fuckin beautiful
How did you get started?
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Thanks!
I had a camera, a telephoto lens and a tripod, got some initial results and started looking into improvements :)
The astrophotography reddit was a great place to learn as well. Not sure if there's still any life there or if it's gone the way of most of Reddit...
It seems to be an expensive hobby based on my initial searches in amazon. high barrier to entry but I think I can make it work in 2 years.
I do self hosting/de-googling/homelab but my daughter is too young to be involved in it, I think astrophotography would be a good thing for us.
I fell in love with the thought of seeing things beyond, my daughter loves learning about satellites and space trash (I'm not sure why exactly).
Thank you!
Yeah, it can be pretty expensive. Some tips:
- figure out if you want a photography kit you can also use for astrophotography or something more dedicated to astrophotography like a telescope you can put a camera in.
- camera equipment is a lot cheaper used.
- A lot of deep space objects are most visible in infrared, a camera without IR filter can capture this but wont be much use for anything else.
- the old astrophotography reddit is a great place to learn about equipment tradeoffs as all photos are posted with equipment details. Makes it easier to learn what you can realistically capture and what requires 10x your budget.
Here you can see where to find it in the night sky (assuming you find the Orion constellation): https://www.go-astronomy.com/images/constellations/Orion.jpg
M42 is what the picture is of. Easy to find but hard (impossible?) to see without a camera.
Amazing!! Thank you for the share.
Wow awesome work! Would make a lovely phone wallpaper hmm… 🤔
Feel free to use it. I took it just before covid, I've had it as my lock screen image since then :)
You’re the best thank you 😃 I’m a sucker for space-y wallpapers 🚀
The galaxy is on Orion’s Belt
enhance.
just kidding, fantastic!
enhancing
enhanced image ready: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f3/Orion_Nebula_-_Hubble_2006_mosaic_18000.jpg/1280px-Orion_Nebula_-_Hubble_2006_mosaic_18000.jpg
(this one is taken by Hubble)
This is FANTASTIC!
well played!
Do you see this realtime? Or do you have to do those long exposures?
It depends a bit on what equipment you have, but at least with my gear I don't see much even on individual 100s exposures until I post process to bring out what was captured.
Wow, that's amazing! Did you need to something weird to get that result? I have been considering getting a 600mm lens for a while now, is that really all it takes to get these kinds of results?
Two things help a lot:
- Tracking, either with a proper telescope mount or as I did, a star adventurer. You align it using the pole star, then it rotates the same speed as earth, counteracting the rotation so the sky stays in the same location relative to your camera.
- Stacking, even with tracking I typically dont get longer than 1-3min exposures. So instead take multiple and stack the images in software. This image is 14x 100s exposures.
But, even without any of those, I've taken images of the Orion Nebulae with just a tripod. It will be a lot blurrier and noisier and generally worse, but its pretty cool to see it show up anyway.
Here's my first picture of this Nebula, it's just a 400mm lens and a tripod. One 2.5min exposure. 
Thank you! That helps a lot to make sense of things!
Mind blowing!
I've been thinking of getting a telescope but I'm afraid I'd not be able to use it outside of taking trips out of the city, for the light pollution.
I'm gonna screenshot it and share on Fakebook.
Pleasure to be back on the old school style web!