Astrophoto For Dummies
Sky of stars… There is probably no such adult, who wouldn’t recall just that sky from the childhood – in the village or near the sea shore, so deep black sky, with myriads of stars, under which everyone dreamt his own dreams. But childhood passes quickly, one gets lumbered with the fuss of everyday concerns and problems, and many of us forget that it still up there, still so black, enticing with its universal fathomlessness and thousands of stars. To see it we just need to turn the head up.
Shooting high-quality pictures of the sky is not a matter of an expensive camera, the most important is a camera’s ability to work with long-term exposure, starting from 30 seconds.
Talking about technical aspects, it is reasonable to start with a camera. Against the established opinion about the preference of the “many-pixel” cameras, astrophotographers unanimously claim that the most important thing after the ability to work with long-time exposure goes the absence of noise on the pictures. So, if one plans to buy a camera for amateur astrophoto it is preferable to choose a camera with large matrix, but with a moderate quantity of megapixels, so beloved by newbies. The second obligatory condition is the possibility to shoot in manual mode, when sensitivity, exposure, diaphragm, and the compression quality can be adjusted by the user.
In fact, astrophotography is an unhurried accumlation of photons. Celestial objects, be it the Sun or the Moon are very dim, so for the succesfool shooting it is necessary to open the shutter as wide as possible and for the longest time possible to wait for the matrix to accumulate a decent quantity of photons, that is light, for the further processing.
In the camera settings it is also necessary to set the minimal compression of the resulting file – JPEG or TIF. If a camera can shoot in RAW format, it is preferable to use it. The less the compression of the picture – the more raw information it handles and, consequently, the more detailes it will be possible to retrive from it with the help of the specialized software.
To sum up it has to be said that if it is possible to use a reflex camera – it is great, as they have large matrices with little rate of noises, removable optics and safe RAW format. But if your photographic set gives a possibility to shoot with the long-time exposure and has high-quality matrix – you can make impressive pictures of the night sky.
Shooting of the celestial bodies may be divided into two types: shooting with the static camera and shooting with follow. In the first case enough to aim the camera at the sky, fix it, set the focus “to infinity” and open the shutter. Adding to the composition the nature objects (trees, mountains) or architectural objects (churches, castles, any interesting building) one may get a charming shot, linking the earthlife with the infinity of the sky.
Shooting with follow is a little more complicated. We will need a special device, which somehow looks like tripod and makes the camera follow the sky objects. The Earth turns, the objects move along the firmament, all followed by the camera.
One may also shoot with a compact camera and a telescope, but it brings not only the difficulties with the connection of the two devices, but the loss of quality. It is important to understand one thing – shooting of the night sky is equally fascinating with long and short focuses, they just solve different aesthetic tasks.
Talking about astrophotography it is necessary to mention special processing software. There are two main tasks while processing the pictures – to drag the maximum details from the usually dim objects and noise removing.
May be at first all these operations with camera and software may seem difficult. However, here functions simple and general rule – you have to give it a try, if you want to understand something. But if once you will feel your heart thumping because of folding the frames together, and looking on a mini-masterpiece – galaxy or star cluster – it gets filled up with joy, you will not be able to give up astrophotography anymore.
via fotoshkola_net
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