Slightly offtopic, it's a stretch but this here is uhmmm a nature photograph ;-)
Sky was mostly clear last night, so I tried another shot with my Nikkor 70-200/2.8E FL ED VR without sky tracker. This time around it was the Orion nebula.
f/2.8, 2s, ISO 1600
I guess I need a telescope.
EDIT: Ordered a telescope, meanwhile I brushed up on my Photoshop skills and was able to push it a bit further. Amazing what you can do with just a 200mm telephoto, looking forward to shooting with a telescope (a 200/1000 Newton).
I don't think it's off topic Thorsten but probably is more a spacescape.Yes it could be sharper.
I can't even imagine how hard it is to try to capture nebulas without telescope or trackers. Nevertheless, thank you for a small piece of sky. :)
It's not hard, actually, the shutter time is critical. I took this one at 2s shutter speed, that was a mistake I should've picked 1s (avoid trails, avoid overexposure, 2 birds with one stone and all that).
But I doubt I'll do it this way again, I've ordered a 200/1000 Newton telescope, that'll get the number of frames I need to shoot down to a sensible value.
Wow. Thorsten trying to get my head around this kind of photography myself. Well done!
Thanks Loretta, think I got the basics covered for deep sky photography, if you have a question shoot away, I'll try to come up with an answer.
Thanks i will !!
I used to do astrophotography...had a roll off roof observatory and all the goodies to take long exposures. The problem everyone has with the Orion Nebula is the core called the Trapezium. If you expose to get all of the dust and gas, the core is blown out.
If you expose for the core, most of the outer detail is lost. The answer is to take exposures at different shutter speeds to capture all of the details, basically HDR without the tone mapping.
To get extreme detail, many would do something like 5 exposures at 10 seconds for the core, 5 exposures at 2 minutes for the middle details and 5 exposures at 8 minutes for the fine stuff.
Granted, this requires a good mount that is polar aligned and can track accurately, bu the results can be stunning.
As an aside, the little blue nebula above Orion is the Running Man Nebula. :-)
Awesome information David, thanks a ton!
You're welcome! If you ever decide to get really serious about this sort of photography, look up a guy named Jerry Lodrigruss. He's forgotten more about DSLR astrophotography than most of us know.