My introduction into Astrophotography:
I've tried pointing my digital cam through the eyepiece of my 6 cm refractor, but no success, so this week I tried taking many images, just using optical zoom on my cam.
Here are the results:
Part of the constellation Orion:
The three bright starts top right are the Orion's belt. To my surprise, a bit of the Great nebula in Orion can be seen.
103 x 4 second exposure, ISO200, 4x optical zoom. A mistake I made was using F3.2, instead of F2.8. I didn't notice the cam change the setting until I was done shooting. Next time I'll use F2.8, which will give about 1.5 times brightness.
Pleiades:
Pleiades is a nebula / young cluster of stars. You can see it in the sky even from a light polluted city. A person with normal vission should be able to resolve 7 to 8 stars in a light polluted area.
It's located "towards the west" of constellation Orion, with a bunch of relativelly bright stars very close together.
This image was compiled from 76 images of 1 second exposure, 12x optical zoom, ISO200, F3.2.
These are my first two stacked images, so any imput is welcome.
The main problem I've had shooting with the cam on a tripod alone is that if I used zoom, I would have to restrict my exposure time, to prevent the stars from being smudgy. A 12x zoom will only allow a max of 1 second exposures. A 4x zoom will only allow around 4 second exposures...
Also, I'm restricted to using low ISO. I tried using ISO1000, but then DeepSkyStacker mistook the noise in the image as stars and the end result was horrible.
I know DeepSkyStacker wasn't really designed with digital cameras pointed at the sky in mind, so if anyone has any experience to share, I'd be thankful.