Night Sky Images - 03/10/2021
Very clear. This was a short session to test that I was able to set up my recently acquired Sky Watcher Star Adventurer 2i successfully, which I was.
Gear:
- Canon EOS 200D
- Tokina AT-X Pro SD 11-16mm f/2.8 (IF) DX
- Tripod
- Star Adventurer 2i tracking mount
Weather:
- Clear (less than 5% cloud)
Location:
- Garden
Software
- Rawtherapee - RAW file importing, optical correction & image processing
- GIMP - RAW/TIF to JPEG, cropping
Images
Just a couple of images to prove to myself that everything was working. The first image was using the maximum timed exposure of my EOS 200D, which was 30 seconds - anything from 25 seconds and over would leave slight trails even with my 11mm lens, so that fact that they all disappeared was great:
Fig. 1: EOS 200D, Tokina f/2.8, 11mm, ISO3200, 1 x 30 seconds, processed from RAW
Fig. 2: EOS 200D, Tokina f/2.8, 11mm, ISO3200, 1 x 30 seconds, unprocessed JPEG
Using the bulb function of the camera, I timed a single 60 second exposure (that turned out to be ~64 seconds in reality!) picking up far more detail than I'd ever been able to see previously:
Fig. 1: EOS 200D, Tokina f/2.8, 11mm, ISO3200, 1 x 64 seconds, processed from RAW
Fig. 1: EOS 200D, Tokina f/2.8, 11mm, ISO3200, 1 x 64 seconds, unprocessed JPEG
Next up is to connect the tracking mount to the camera so that I can control the exposures using the WiFi-connected smartphone application… and try my hand at stacking images. I'll also have to find somewhere reasonably local that I can walk to with a bit less streetlight pollution, as the bleed-through at the bottom of the image was from the street some ~50 metres away from our garden.