First of all, please note that this was my first proper attempt at deep sky photography, so sadly, mistakes were made which I will go through later in the post.
If you would like to know what equipment I used for this shot, here is the list:
Camera:
Sony A7iii - in 35mm Mode, 0.5sec exposure at 600mm.
Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary Lens
Tripod
Software:
Deep Sky Stacker
Photoshop
This is my first real attempt at shooting deeps sky objects without using a telescope, I found a tutorial on youtube and thought I would give it a try, I did hit some hurdles along the way, which I know what to do the next time I try the shot, so I hear you saying, what are they?
The first hurdle was my tripod, I don't have a star tracker, but I set the camera shooting on interval mode, and I was just moving the tripod accordingly, to keep the image centre, however, the left and right movements were fine, but the up movement was a little trickier and so I ruined a few shots, however, there are around 70 shots blended into this one image (not counting darks and bias frames).
Hurdle number two was when I imported the images into deep sky stacker, the final product was just a red picture, you could see the detail, but why was it red, I realised the my camera was set to Adobe RGB, not standard RGB, I used adobe bridge and converted all images from adobe rgb to what I needed and this seemed to sort that issue out.
Now the next issue is with the camera, shooting at ISO6400, you do get a bit of noise, especially as my camera was at f/6.3 (if memory serves me correctly), what I forgot to do was change the shutter mode, I usually shoot on silent/electronic shutter, but, this does cause banding in the image, I've done my best to get it out, but it's still there, so next time, remember to put it in normal shutter mode.
Finally the processing, because of the banding, I couldn't really bring the shot out how I wanted, but for my first ever attempt, I am more than happy with this, I've figured out my mistakes that I've made and will implement the corrections on my next shoot.
The shot below is just a single shot before I did the blending using the software, as you can see, the blend does look much better (apart from that banding lol).
Anyhow, I really hope you've enjoyed this little post, but as you know, there's more work to do to get the shot I really want, but what do you think for a first attempt?
Thanks for reading and have a fantastic weekend.
All the best :-)
