How to capture Orion Nebula only with DSLR

in #yu-stem5 years ago

Hello everyone! Today I will show you how to capture Orion Nebula by using your DSLR, lens and tripod. Nothing else you will need for this photo. Time is what you mostly need for this to happen and that is it.

For this photo I used my trusty Canon 600D and lens from manufacturer Tair and their 135mm lens with aperture of f/2.8. It's M42 screw mount lens so you will need adapter for it that it will be attached to your camera. For my camera I used M42 to EOS adapter which is about 3-4$ on internet.

ORION NEBULA.jpg

CameraLensShutter speedF-stopISO
Canon 600DTair 11A 135mm2 sec.f/3.23200

https://ibb.co/Br54WJR this is link for full resolution image

So let's start. I will tell you how I did it and how much time I put to make this look nice.

First you need to attach your camera to your tripod and manually focus to your stars, best thing is to use your live view mode on camera so that you can focus much better. You will need one more thing, remote shutter release so you can leave your camera and remotely press shutter. You will need this just to reduce camera shake while pressing shutter button on camera. It's not necessary but it will make your life easier. :D

The most important is calculation. Because you don't have tracking device you will need to use some calculations to recreate using star tracker. First you need to use rule of 500. This rule gives you how much long exposure you can have using this lens and camera. For my example I used this, 500 divided with 135mm focal length and crop factor of 1.6 for canon 600D and it gave me about 2 seconds of exposure. These 2 second exposure will give you sharp stars without any star trailing.

Next thing what I calculated was how long exposure I want for this Nebula. I wanted 10 minute exposure so I had to compensate by making 300 photos of 2 second exposure which will give me one photo of 10 minutes. Be prepared for waiting game and some adjustments, because Earth rotates you need to align stars every, about 60-70 shots. After I made 300 photos I made 10 photos of dark frames. Dark frames are photos made with same exposure but with lens cap on, this is used for reducing noise of your image that sensor makes.

Next and final thing to make one photo is to stack them into one with software that is made for that, like Sequator for example, you need to add your light frames (300 photos) and dark frames (10 photos) and let it do its job. After it's done you will get one almost noise free photo with a lot of details that you can adjust in photo editing software. I used Photosop for that.

You can see on this screenshot difference between one photo and stacked 300 photos. One photo is not usable at all, it's full of noise and there is not any details of nebula.

Final thing is editing, this took me about 45 minutes to edit. I done some astro curves to this photo, changed levels of different colors, added some sharpness, changed white balance and etc. It's a long process of trial and error but you will get amazing results at the end.

You can see GIF that I have made to show you some gradually improvement of photo that I edited.

My Video3.gif

Here is photo that is stacked and before editing in Photoshop. It's amazing how much you can get out of this one photo.

ORION NEBULA 1.jpg

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you learned something. Have a nice weekend! :)

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