Milkyway photos with the NX300

farmersride wrote:

So my next goal with this camera is to take a photo of the milky way. My understanding of this type of photo is that you must follow the 500 rule to prevent streaking while at the same time getting enough light on a VERY DARK night to bring out all the stars. With my kit lens at 18mm this is a 27mm equivalent so in order to prevent streaking I'd have to limit the shutter to 18.5 seconds. In my experience so far with astrophotography this will not produce a bright star shot with f3.5 and ISO less than 3200.

So here's my question - I know it's possible to align photos with hugin (thanks for the hint ttbek) but I've never done this for the purpose of cropping all the photos to the same frame and then stacking them. Has anybody on here done this in order to take milky way photos? any tutorials you know of?

I'm going to make the drive to my nearest dark sky area on the next clear new moon and I want to make sure I have the processing part of it figured out before I go.

Hmm, you know, I haven't tried to do the exact overlay in hugin, just the panorama overlaying the edges.  There is another program though, Luminance HDR, that makes use of the Hugin code that I think makes it pretty straightforward.  I'll poke around a bit later to see if there are any good tutorials for this with either program as I'm not really up for making a tutorial right now.

I found instructions for this operation with hugin. It also can be used to do focus stacking for macro! Are there any free programs that do focus stacking for you?

http://hugin.sourceforge.net/docs/manual/Align_a_stack_of_photos.html