Astrophotgraphy - Orion Nebula with SX70Hs

[Yshishani]

ASTROPHOTGRAPHY - Orion Nebula

This is the craziest project ever to be done on a Canon SX70.

Took some 41 photos, stacked them with DeepSkyStacker and here is the result.

Canon SX70Hs, Skywatcher Adventurer mount, 41 frames x 15 seconds exposures, zoom @184mm, ISO100, F5.6. Edited in Adobe Lightroom Classic

I wish CHDK comes to the SX70, as I have struggled with the focus on the stars, and no means to control the ISO settings.

 

[Sue Anne Rush]

That is awesome Thanks for sharing how you did it

ASTROPHOTGRAPHY - Orion Nebula

This is the craziest project ever to be done on a Canon SX70.

Took some 41 photos, stacked them with DeepSkyStacker and here is the result.

Canon SX70Hs, Skywatcher Adventurer mount, 41 frames x 15 seconds exposures, zoom @184mm, ISO100, F5.6. Edited in Adobe Lightroom Classic

I wish CHDK comes to the SX70, as I have struggled with the focus on the stars, and no means to control the ISO settings.

 

[D Lynch]

I'm so glad I looked.

Amazing photo.

Your image has such beautiful quality.

I'm red/green colour deficient. I wish I could see it even more clearly.

Dave

Toronto

 

[OutsideTheMatrix]

wow the tracking mount is key! But the 184mm focal length is that EFL or actual focal length? Also which superzooms can work with CHDK?

I dont have a tracking mount but I have deep sky stacker...if I stack the equivalent of your total exposure but untracked (many more subs of much shorter duration, say 2.5 sec each instead of 15 sec each and let's say 246 subs instead of 41- so 6x as many subs to account for each sub being 1/6 the exposure), will I get a similar result?

 

[gloaming]

It should work, but I wonder how much latitude your software has in terms of registration/alignment of each image. At least with an equatorial mount, the drive keeps the camera oriented very closely in right ascension and declination, so you could have much longer exposures...all other things being equal.

without tracking, however, how will you keep each exposure more-than-less aligned to the same aiming point? My question stems from my lack of experience. I only have one facility to stack, and that is the freeware CombineZP which, I have found, doesn't like the various successive images to stray too far from the same aiming point.

 

[OutsideTheMatrix]

It should work, but I wonder how much latitude your software has in terms of registration/alignment of each image. At least with an equatorial mount, the drive keeps the camera oriented very closely in right ascension and declination, so you could have much longer exposures...all other things being equal.

without tracking, however, how will you keep each exposure more-than-less aligned to the same aiming point? My question stems from my lack of experience. I only have one facility to stack, and that is the freeware CombineZP which, I have found, doesn't like the various successive images to stray too far from the same aiming point.

DSS and Sequator are also both freeware, I've been using them, maybe you'd like them too.

Also, I'm wondering how one focuses when nothing but Sirius can even be seen in the LCD. At least that's the case with me and my Olympus EM10Mk2. I wonder if this Canon SX70 can see more stars in the LCD and can even focus on them?

He uses the same DSS freeware for stacking that I have, but the one difference is key, he has a tracking mount and I dont have that. Cant even see Polaris here to do an alignment. He did 41 frames 15 sec each at ISO 100. I wonder if I can do 246 frames at 2.5 sec each at ISO 100....but since I have a M43 camera, I can actually use much higher ISO to achieve a similar result too....and I dont even have to use ISO 3200 like in my image! I could do 31 frames at 2.5 sec each at ISO 800....or I could do 24 images at 2.5 sec each and ISO 3200 and let the stacking take care of the noise (but would nebular colors be blown out at that exposure level and high ISO?) He said it's 184mm, is that EFL? If so mine is 150mm EFL. I dont think his can be actual focal length because that would be around 1000mm EFL which would nearly fill the frame with the Orion Nebula I think?

Here's what I've been able to do so far:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/64642528

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[Yshishani]

Hi,

The 184mm is the actual focal length on this camera. The equivalent focal length would be around 1016mm.

 

[Yshishani]

I have made another trial with the same setup, but this time with full zoom (FL=247mm or EFL=1365mm), with 300 x 15 second exposures. Stacked id DSS, processed in Siril and then in LrC.

What do you think?

 

[Telyx]

That looks a lot like photographs from Lick, Palomar, Yerkes, and other observatories in many of the astronomy books I read in my youth. Nice shot!