"Night 2: the big dipper"
With one set of exposures under my belt, I adjusted my camera settings a little and tried my hand again. As luck would have it, my window framed the big dipper quite nicely, so I set up in front of that and let it rip.
- 51 light frames
- f/3.5
- 10 second exposures
- ISO 1000
- 18mm focal length
- 31 dark frames
- 31 bias frames - same everything except exposure time: 1/4000th second
Stacked in deep sky stacker and processed in Picasa. I really need to get some better software. This was closer to the horizon than the previous shot, so there was heavy light pollution near the bottom of the frame. After abusing the stacked result pretty severely, I ended up with a recognizable big dipper and black sky. I ended up cropping a fair amount, so the effective focal length is quite a bit longer than 18mm. I think it turned out fairly good, considering:
