Well, a lot of time has passed since the last post. Whoops, I’m making a habit of that. The past year or two has been very full, and one thing I have been occupying my time with is astrophotography.
In mid 2024, I started off attempting to capture the Carina Nebula with my R7, which was mildly successful, but I won’t include the result here - it’s not worth speaking of. I then worked on getting myself some astrophotography equipment - namely a small refractor telescope and mount, and I used my R7 to capture the Orion Nebula, the result of which appears below;
I was pretty pleased with this result. Fast forward to now, and I’ve accumulated more experience, better techniques, and better equipment (still the same telescope and mount were used below though!). Better techniques, both in the capture and in the processing. My current render of Orion appears below, with the capture finished last month.
This is a small crop from a mosaic that is much larger, and was assembled from over three thousand individual shots taken over 55 hours of exposure. Both images are taken in natural light, from my urban backyard.
I’m pretty pleased with where I’ve come in the last year. One thing I really have to start putting down in writing is my processing technique and workflow so I can be more consistent. Now I’m getting strong results, I can start settling into a workflow that I can repeat.
I’m in the process of changing over my main astro camera from a one-shot colour camera to a monochrome model. That will change my workflows considerably, so that makes it a good time to start putting down in a more permanent form how I’m processing and capturing images.