small [OM SYSTEM OM-1 mk ii | 17mm f1.2 | 10s ISO 8000]
1d 11h ago by lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/jwiggler in astrophotography from lemmy.dbzer0.com
How long of an exposure was this?
Whoops, probably shouldve thrown that in the title. it was a 10s exposure at iso 8000, wide open at f/1.2
i processed using darktable. this was my first time trying anything remotely astro related, so any criticism welcome! there's some hot pixels down there in the shadows i coudlve cleaned up a bit more, but meh
Edit: just to add some more detail because I failed to read the rules. Sorry bout that. I processed in darktable, essentially I just used darktable's astro Denoise module, set the strength to around 75. I used the regular Denoise profiled module, and capture sharpening. I pushed the darks down and pulled the highlights up in the sky with color balance RGB and a mask, and did essentially the opposite with a second color balance RGB instance in order to bring out the land and the house. I had quite a few hot pixels that I tried to remove with the hot pixel module, but it didn't seem to work, so I used retouch to just remove them. They were all in the land section so I didn't disturb any stars
Looks great for a first shot! If you took a couple more exposures you could stack them and use dark frames to help with the hot pixels. Also if you ever get a star tracker you could stop the lens down slightly to help with the distorted stars on the edges, but overall it looks pretty decent
Thanks! When you say
the distorted stars on the edges
do you mean the edge of the frame or the edges of the stars? I'm assuming you mean edge of the frame due to the edge-to-edge sharpness diminishing wide open, but it seems to my eyes all my stars are a bit distorted -- even in the center. Then again, I have no idea how they ought to look! lol. I did use the 500 rule to try to avoid star trails. I think 13s exposure was acceptable but i wanted to be safe so i went with 10s.
any chance you have any reading recommendations for astrophotography, or maybe even for astronomy in general?
Edge of the frame. Since stars are point sources of light any distortion from the optics, trailing from a long exposure, or even the atmosphere will distort them. IMO the center stars are what I’d consider acceptable for an untracked image, but then again I don’t really do much widefield astrophotography. It could also be your camera shifted slightly or from walking around near it?
There’s a number of YouTube channels of varying quality/expertise that are good for beginners, like AstroBackyard, Alaskan astro, cuiv the lazy geek to name a few. The cloudynights forum should If your a discord person, we do have one for this community (.gg/astrophotography) that’s pretty active with a lot of info that’s been gathered over the years, and it’s where I’ve learned most of what I know about the hobby.