Friday, January 15, 2016

More proof I am not an astrophotographer

I think I need to make a T-shirt that says "I am not an astrophotographer" mostly to poke fun at myself.  I have no desire to devote time to either data acquisition (hours per image) or learning the processing skills to create beautiful images of space (hundreds of hours learning, several hours for each image).  Yet, for some reason, every few months I go through a phase where I stick a camera into a telescope and take some pictures to try and capture something pretty.

I stretch the contrast, try and clean up the noise a little, and assuming I did a decent job with focus call it a day.  Then, I proceed to look at my pictures and realizing that I have the potential to do better I say to myself "Self, you need to learn how to this properly."  I start to play around with photoshop, read about various techniques online and quickly retreat from the notion that I will be furthering my skills in astrophotography.  Time goes by and soon it is "rinse and repeat."  I suspect the truth is that I like taking pictures through a telescope, but am not going to devote myself to it.  The lesson of course is to be satisfied with the process and results and not compare them to the many fantastic images taken by my friends and others on the internet.

Without further ado, more proof that I am not an astrophotographer.  Three more pictures from my recent time on Mount Lemmon (see the previous post).  Again, all of these images were taken with my Canon 6D through a 100mm Sky Watcher Esprit triplet refractor, and all are single exposures.


M31, M32, M110 - The Andromeda Galaxy and companions

M45 - The Pleiades

M42 - The Orion Nebula and NGC 1977 the Running Man Nebula (at top)

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