The Nebulas of Orion - Second Attempt at Astrophotography
For my second attempt at astrophotography, I decided to work on fixes to the problems of the first attempt. I wanted a better polar alignment and to shoot shorter exposures at a wider angle to fix the drifting image and the star trail problems of the first attempt with Andromeda.
For this one I kept the same setup but added an angle viewfinder to the polar scope to make it easier to work on the polar alignment. Was far easier than trying to get into position to do it straight through the polar score like I did on the first shoot. Got things aligned right and got my camera gear and the counter balance setup and then confirmed the alignment. Got everything good and locked down this time and turned the camera towards Orion.
Wanted to do a wide view of the constellation to capture a bunch of the nebulas so I stayed at 90mm on my RF70-200 f/4 L lens and left lots of room for the expected drift across the field of view like I had with Andromeda. Set things up for 240 15 second shots at f/4.5 ISO 2000 and went back inside while the camera and star tracker did their thing. Wanted to get the Orion Nebula, de Mairan's Nebula, Running Man Nebula, Horse Head Nebula and Flame Nebula all in one shot.
When I pulled the images off the camera later, they were all spot on and NOTHING moved. I ran though all 240 shots and other than some satellites moving across some of the frames it was like looking at a single picture. I tossed the few that had the satellites and ended up with almost 60 minutes total exposure time. All the images looked like this one:
Canon R6mkII with the RF70-200 f/4 L f/4.5, 15 seconds at ISO 2000.
On this shoot I attempted to align and stack the pictures in PixInsight with its plate solving features used as well. Worked well and I got a very good stack from that. I then followed Peter Zelinka’s tutorial again to edit the resulting image. The results are below:
A very good second attempt. The next time I will either shoot for the Orion Nebula or the Horse Head and Flame Nebulas once we get clear skies again. Now I’m equipped for autoguiding, and computer aided polar alignment and I’m looking forward to trying it. Will also probable use my RF100-400 f/5.6 - 8 at 400mm with the longer exposures.
The PixInsight edit of Andromeda was done after doing the PixInsight edit of this session.
