The Orion Nebula (M42) is a massive stellar nursery about 1,344 light-years away, spanning 24 light-years across.
This was my most recent “tracked” capture in Simsbury, CT. Only a 10-minute drive from my home, the open horizon of a local farm helped immensely. The perfect new moon, along with the extremely late hours, contributed to the quality of the capture. However, the night initially started off extremely cold and partly cloudy, preventing me from polar aligning my star tracker with Polaris for the first hour. The night felt unhopeful—it seemed as if I wasn’t going to get lucky. Thankfully, I waited for an opportunity between two clouds to quickly align with the North Star and successfully calibrated my tracker. Even though it remained partly cloudy, especially near the horizon, looking straight up I spotted the Orion constellation. While the skies in a Bortle 4 zone (an indicator of light pollution levels) aren’t ideal for stargazing, the power of tracking—a device that moves with the Earth’s rotation to keep the target in frame during long exposures—along with careful post-processing, allowed me to capture this beautiful nebula. With a magnitude of 4.0 (for reference, the lower the magnitude, the more visible the object; a full moon is -12.7, and Mars is -1.29), the details of this celestial wonder came to life.
🔭 Orien Nebula (M42)
📷 December 29th, 2024
📍Barn Door Hills, Simsbury, CT
⚙️ ISO-800, f/5.6, 350 mm, 30 sec.
⏱️ 30 second exposures x 60 --> 30 min total exposure
Optics: Canon EF 28-350mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens
Camera: Canon EOS 6D Full-Frame Digital SLR Camera 20.2 Megapixel CMOS Sensor & DIGIC 5+ Image Processor Filters: N/A
Tracker: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer GTi Equatorial Tracking Mount
Stacking: DeepSkyStacker
Editing: Adobe Lightroom
This is a photo I took during the session, showing my camera screen displaying one of the many exposures I captured of Orion that night.
This is a photo of me calibrating my Star Adventurer GTi using polar and two-star alignment.
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is a spiral galaxy located about 2.5 million light-years away, spanning an incredible 220,000 light-years across. It is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way, predicted to collide with our galaxy in about 4.5 billion years.
Taken in my own backyard, this was the first deep sky object I captured after purchasing the Star Adventurer GTi. Surprisingly, despite only having about 15 minutes of usable (and unfortunately unfocused) exposure, this shot took many hours to complete. On a cold December Saturday night, I spent from 7 PM to midnight going back and forth between my backyard and the family room—probably 15 times or more. It took several long, and at times frustrating, hours in below-freezing temperatures to learn how to properly calibrate and polar align my new tracker, all while trying to keep both my computer and hands warm. By the time I got everything aligned, Andromeda was already dipping below my backyard’s high tree line. When I finally took a test exposure, I was surprised to see Andromeda perfectly framed between the bare branches of the winter trees. However, because everything in the sky moves, many exposures had to be tossed due to tree branches creeping into the frame. After about half an hour of shooting, I was left with just 15 minutes of usable data. At 2 AM, I uploaded the images to my computer, only to realize that all of them were slightly out of focus—a tough lesson learned the hard way. Still, as my first-ever deep sky capture, I was thrilled with what I managed to produce and excited by the possibilities of what I could achieve going forward.
🔭 Andromeda Galaxy (M31)
📷 December 26th, 2024
📍Barn Door Hills, Simsbury, CT
⚙️ ISO-1000, f/5.6, 350 mm, 30 sec.
⏱️30 second exposures x 30 --> 15 min total exposure
Optics: Canon EF 28-350mm f/3.5-5.6L IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens
Camera: Canon EOS 6D Full-Frame Digital SLR Camera 20.2 Megapixel CMOS Sensor & DIGIC 5+ Image Processor Filters:
N/A
Tracker: Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer GTi Equatorial Tracking Mount
Stacking: DeepSkyStacker
Editing: Adobe Lightroom
A photo of me calibrating and polar aligning the tracker using 2-star alignment.
📷 Taken by my Brother
A single raw 30 second exposure of M31 prior to image stacking and processing.
Taking a trip to the renowned Mauna Kea observatory with my family, this was my first ever experience with astrophotography.
Being on top of a volcano in the middle of the largest ocean in the world, Mauna Kea was the #1 best star gazing I have experienced in my life. The glow of the milky-way being visible to the naked eye, and being above the stratocumulus clouds, there is no doubt why this is a renowned observatory. Using my Canon Rebel T7 I took my first ever exposure of the stars with instructional help of a local guide. This is where I discovered the rush of capturing the night sky.
🔭 Milky Way
📷 July 6th, 2023
📍Mauna Kea Observatory, Island of Hawai'i, HI
⚙️ ISO-2500, f/4, 30 mm, 8 sec.
⏱️8 second exposure x 1
Optics: Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III Telephoto Zoom Lens
Camera: Canon EOS Rebel T7 DSLR Camera
Filters: N/A
Tracker: N/A
Stacking: N/A
Editing: Apple Photos
Borrowing a friend's "Stellina", this smart telescope was able to capture mutliple impressive deep sky objects
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