MICHAEL W. DEAN

—
I took these photos using this gear and methods. I took 15 of each area, and also took 15 DARKS (photos same settings same night same temp same camera with the lens cap on, to produce a record of the noise inherent to the camera CCD to remove with software later.)

I ran the RAW photo files through Photoshop using a script to batch turn them all into TIFFs, with no compression and keeping the sizes the same. I used this tutorial on YouTube.

I used the free program Deep Sky Stacker, using this YouTube tutorial. I did the thing where I ran “Register Checked Photos”, and told it to only use 80% best photos. Then it ran. Took 15 to 30 min for each of the two sets.

Then I ran the resulting TIFF outputs through Adobe Lightroom Classic to turn up the contrast, de-haze, blacks, color saturation saturation a bit, and saved the profile as a starting point next time.

I tried auto-removing the little bit of purple fringing, but kept it in, it makes the stars look a little more like jewels. lol.

Fun fact: DSS counts the stars before it runs. There are about 60,000 distinct visible stars in each of these photos.

I got a RedCat telescope so things might get even more interesting soon.

How I take star photos

How I do these

It’s kind of fascinating, and this is how all tracker mounts work, even huge observatories.

You point the base north. Not magnetic north, but geographic north.

You mount it at an angle equal to your latitude. For me that’s 45.13 or as close as I can get.

Then you use the sighter scope, a cheap scope down the center of the motor, to align to the North Celestial Pole. That’s near the Northern Star (Sigma Octantis star in Southern Hemisphere, but same idea.)
Northern Star, Polaris, actually orbits that center visually from the earth.

On other mounts, the sighnter scope is on the side, and/or is a video camera hooked up to a monitor.

That star is not what you center on, it’s what it rotates around. There’s an app that replaces manly math manly men used to do.

The mount does one full rotation every sidereal day. That’s 23 hours 56 minutes 4.091 seconds.

If you get it perfect, the stars will never move in your camera’s view, and you can take long exposures. Those stellar deep space photos can be many hours, or hours over several nights, plus a lot of processing.

My mount, Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer, can do a few minutes solid exposure without drift, when aligned right. Or you can do longer, stills or even video, and fix it with software.

All stunning space and deep space photos have some / a lot of post processing.

See also: How I take Star Photos