Last weekend I managed to get well out of the urban light pollution and traveled to the Great Lakes Star Gaze (a dark sky site & astronomy "star party" in northern Michigan.)
While there, I managed to do a bit of astrophotography with my Canon EOS 60Da. The image below is the result of my work. To get this image I had to capture 8 exposures, each single exposure was 8 minutes long at ISO 800. The camera was attached to a TeleVue NP101is telescope (540mm @ f/5.4) mounted to a Losmandy G11 mount (the telescope is tracking the sky as it moves to keep the camera on target and thus avoid blur.)
The images straight out of the camera do not look like this (I have an example posted in my 'gallery' here on the Canon community site of a single 8 minute frame if you want to see what a single frame looks like.)
These images are all "stacked" using image registration & integration software (I use a special astrophotography image processing application called PixInsight). The image data is processed and ultimately "stretched" to enhance the image, exaggerate the color, brighten the object, etc. So while the image itself is real, this is not what you see through the eyepiece of a telescope (that's why I offered to let anyone see what an individual unprocessed frame looks like.)
Learning to capture the images has a bit of a learning curve and learning to process the images has another big learning curve. I am just starting to learn the capabilities of this new astrophotography image processing application. This is one of hte first images I've processed this way. It's a steep learning curve and I'm still learning it.
Here's the image:
Here's the single source image (this is what they look like out of the camera) from my gallery (note that I rotated the image 180º so this will appear flipped.)
Regards,
Tim
