This image was taken over the course of several nights from my backyard in Portland Oregon. It’s an example of narrowband Astrophotography where filters are used that only pass the light of the nebula and block almost all man-made light. This might be called Extreme Astrophotography in that it requires many night of exposures to be collected - in fact this is stacked from 138 ten minute long exposures.
The equipment includes a 530mm focal length telescope, a tracking mount, a cooled mono camera that uses the same chip as the Sony A7R4, and a second camera that took a picture of a single star every second and sent corrections to the tracking mount if the star moves off it’s pixel.
Since the filter only let in one wavelength of light the camera can only capture one “color” at a time. So the 138 exposures were divided into three groups each with a different wavelength filter. After capture the images are aligned on the stars and the pixel values are averaged to remove noise.
Since this happens all night long over several nights the whole capture process has to be automated or I would die from lack of sleep!
Hope you found this interesting!
(I had to reduce the size of the image to make <20 megs, so this is not the full resolution)
Wow!!! amazing photo.
Kevin, this photo is simply amazing, but what is even more amazing is the whole process you went through to capture it.
awesome.
I don't do any astrophotography (yet) but this is stunning and absolutely beautiful. I second Tim that the process is amazing - thank you for detailing what you did to get this done.
One detail I didn't see:
How LONG did it take to process and what software did you use?
Hard to estimate the total time to process. It occurs over several days, in part as the data comes in each night. More than 10 hours for sure, maybe 20.
Software includes:
- TheSkyX to control the cameras and mount
- CCDAutopilot to script the capture process
- CCDStack to calibrate the sub-exposures
- Pixinsight to stack and stretch the masters as well as combine into RGB
- Photoshop to adjust contrast, saturation, sharpness
- Topaz for noise reduction
Thanks, Kevin. Continued success to you.
I've always been in awe (and a I admit a little jealous) of shots like this. Totally appreciate the time and dedication put into them though. Fascinating and beautiful shot.
Awesome. Are the brightest stars in the photo part of the nebula? If so, can you say how many?
I don’t know for sure, but since we are looking at a part of the Milky Way (Cygnus) we are looking through the arm of our galaxy. That means lots off stars from various distances. So maybe some but maybe not. I don’t recall the number of stars my stacking program counted but I’m sure it was >10,000. I de-emphasized the stars somewhat to allow the nebula to be better seen.
Generally when looking at a nebula, the brightest stars are in the nebula. IDK, but my guess is the brightest one in the upper right and the one in the lower left, bottom center, etc.
Awesome Kevin! Well done sir!!!!!