blog:photography:night:2021_10_03

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

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.

  • blog/photography/night/2021_10_03.txt
  • Last modified: 2021/10/04 08:58
  • by john