Went out to a darksite and tried snapping some milky way pics with my DSLR while the main telescope rig was doing its thing. Pretty pleased with how this turned out since I don't really do widefield imaging, and it's only 5 minutes of total exposure time (yes I know the stars are trailed 15" exposures were too long in hindsight). The milky way core is home to many different deep sky objects, including all of these that I've shot before, and a bunch more that I haven't photographed yet. Captured on July 18th, 2023 from the Deerlick Astronomy Village (bortle 3 zone)
Places where I host my other images:
Equipment:
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Canon T3i (astro-modded)
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Tamron 17-50mm lens
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Joby 3K tripod planted firmly on top of a RAV4
Acquisition: 5 minutes (17mm f/2.8 ISO 800)
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20x15"
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Darks- 10
Capture Software:
- Captured using my finger on the shutter button
PixInsight Processing
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BatchPreProcessing
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StarAlignment
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ImageIntegration
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DrizzleIntegration (2x, var β=1.5)
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DynamicCrop to remove blurred trees at the bottom
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DynamicBackgroundExtraction
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SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration
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SCNR green
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ArcsinhStretch + HT to stretch nonlinear
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Shitloads of curves to adjust lightness, saturation, contrast etc with varying luminance/star masks
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MMT for large scale chrominance noise reduction
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NoiseXTerminator
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Invert > SCNR >invert > SCNR to remove excess green and magentas
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more curves
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DarkStructureEnhance
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LocalHistogramEqualization
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EZ Star reduction
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NoiseGenerator to add noise back into star reduced areas
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DynamicCrop again
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Resample to 60%
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Annotation