Thursday, September 29, 2016

September 28, 2016 Wide Field Photography with Canon 40mm lens

The weather was fantastic this evening and so I headed out to the observatory just to do some tests with my Canon 40mm "pancake" lens.


At f/2.8 it is very "fast" but the best images came when I stopped it down to f/4. Using my Canon t2i camera and Celestron NexStar 4SE mount (I removed the telescope and put the camera in its place) and put the mount in the equatorial mode.



I was able to get up to one minute exposures (at least) though I chose to limit most of my images to 30 secs each, choosing instead to stack the photos with Deep Sky Stacker Live. The camera is "unmodified" so it is not as sensitive to infrared, thus it does not get as much redness in nebulas as a result. But this evening was about testing, not creating.

But here are a few results:

Wide Field around Andromeda Galaxy (full view):


20 -30 sec exposures at ISO 1600
40mm at f/4
stacked for a total of 10 minutes
post-processed with GIMP 

This is a "cropped in" image of the same...


 Wide field image around IC 1396 (centered)
6 - one minute exposures at ISO 1600
40mm at f/2.8
stacked for a total of 6 minutes
post-processed with GIMP

Wide field image around Cassiopeia (slightly upper left)...
17 -20 sec exposures at ISO 1600
40mm at f/4
stacked for a total of 5 1/2 minutes
post-processed with GIMP 

All images were stacked with Deep Sky Stacker Live and post-process with GIMP photoprocessing program using Levels

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