Sean Esopenko

DeepSkyStacker: Backyard Astro-photography

June 14, 2010

I stayed up late tonight and did a little backyard astrophotography. I don’t know much about astronomy but I saw some pictures of nebulas captured by people with the digital rebels and DeepSkyStacker so I figured I’d see what I could do. DeepSkyStacker is windows freeware available here.

I followed the tutorial written up at A.S.I.G.N. and got some not-bad results of my own. No nebula but I did manage to get a lot of stars. The sky was quite clear but I did the shoot at about midnight. This meant the sun hadn’t quite set 100% and there was still a blue cast to the sky overhead. I wasn’t up for waiting until 3AM in the morning to shoot photographs. Thankfully the moon was only at 10% and had set before 11:30 pm so I managed to get something, at least.

The images were shot with my 5D, the Zeiss 35mm at F4 and 1600 ISO. There were fourteen 30 second exposures stacked using the software. I used Canon DPP to export the RAW files to TIFFs. When it finished stacking them I thought the software was broken but I realized afterwards I had to play with the RGB levels sliders to get the recorded tone range situated properly in the curve and white-balanced. Then the empty white image turned into actual stars. I rendered with the saturation at about 18%. There were no calibration images used whatsoever. Next time the weather clears up overnight I’ll shoot some calibration images. It’s supposed to greatly improve your contrast and reduce the noise.

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