Here is a nice explanation of the process of taking astrophotography without a tracker (just a tripod mounted camere). He does a good job of explaining the various parts of the stacking process (Light frames, dark frames, bias frames (but not flats, which he does not use. Flats help DeepSkyStacker to identify, and compensate for, those dust spots on your sensor, so they are a Good Idea.) The technique he uses can be used by any tripod mounted DSLR, but he has to take 400 exposures at 1.6 seconds to approximate what I got with the O-GPS in 11 exposures. He also had to use ISO 6400 where I was able to use just ISO 800.
It obviously takes a lot longer for DSS to do the stacking with more images, so where my DSS process took about 10-15 minutes, his takes over 6 hours of processing time. (Obviously processing time depends upon the oomph of your computer). Actually, comparing what he got with what I got... I got the disk of Andromeda all the way out to the small elliptical galaxy of M32. In his image M32 is floating outside the disk. Still, it is impressive what you can get with a high number of really short exposures. The video is well worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0JSTF8SGi4 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
