A friend of mine loaned me his Canon XTi for the weekend so that I could try out a DSLR camera before I make my purchase.  I plan to head out to some dark skies on Saturday but I couldn’t wait to test out the camera.  So I set it out on my balcony and took a few shots.  This is important because I can then compare the camera quality between a Canon DSLR and my Panasonic Lumix TZ5.  Remember from an earlier post that the Lumix didn’t have ISO control when in starry night mode.

I was really lucky, the sky cleared out soon after I had set up the camera.  Here is the picture, straight out of the camera.

Canon XTi DSLR, 17mm focal length, f/4, ISO 1600, 30 seconds exposure

So the first thing I notice is that ISO 1600 really captures a lot of light.  The picture from my Lumix TZ5 was not this bright even when I set the camera to 60 seconds exposure.  I import the picture into Adobe Lightroom 2 (great software) and played with the color temperature.  The picture is very red, likely from the street lights that’s all over the place.  So I changed the white balance and was able to get this picture.

Color corrected image

One thing I should point out is that I record all the images in RAW mode.  Lightroom has the ability to read Canon RAW formats directly so changing white balance doesn’t affect the picture quality like it would if the image was in JPEG.  The next thing I wanted to do is to bring out the sky as much as possible.  To do that, I increase the contrast as much as I could and reduced a lot of the colors in the foreground (ie, green).  Here is what the picture looks like.

Picture with high contrast

This is a pretty cool picture, and upon closer inspection you could see a lot of interesting stuff.  You could see most of Scorpius’ body.  His tail is right in the middle of the picture.  If you follow Scorpius’ stinger up and a little to the left, you can see M7.  To the right of M7 is M6, the butterfly cluster.  The Milky way is barely visible but you can see it in the constellation Sagittarius that is near the top of the picture.  If you look closely, you could see the Lagoon nebula by the bow of Sagittarius.  The line of dots on the left is an airplane flying into frame.

So this is very good news for me.  The test shows that even in such a light polluted area I was able to capture some very interested objects.  I can’t wait to head out to darker skies later.

Jupiter finally moved far enough for me to put my telescope on it at a reasonable time (about 11:30pm).  I was really looking forward to this because this is the first time I looked at Jupiter though the Orion XT6.  Not surprisingly, the view was a bit disappointing.  Jupiter is about the size of a pea.  It is very bright, so bright that I think its obscuring a lot of the details.  The only features I could see on Jupiter are 2 brown bands near the top of a bright pea.  Jupiter’s moons are also visible as bright points, there are 4 that I could see.

The highest magnification I was able to use is 200x (15mm with 2.5x barlow).  I tried to use 300x magnification but the seeing last night could not handle something that high.  Jupiter at 300x was just too blurry and I couldn’t even see the brown bands anymore.

I’ll tried to get some images on Jupiter in a few weeks, after it moved a bit more so that I could get my telescope on it earlier.  Hopefully I could get some stable air for that.

I’ve been surfing the web looking for information about fixed tripod astrophotography.  I can across a website call Astropix ran by Jerry Lodriguss.  That website showcased a bunch of constellation pictures that looked incredible.  The author said that you don’t really need a tracking mount for these pictures because star trails should not be a problem.  I agree with that base on the pictures I took so far.

Obviously Jerry is a professional photographer and I’m not, so I’ll need to improve my skills.  However, I think also my Lumix camera simply can’t compare to a real DSLR camera.  For example, I notice his big dipper picture he has the ISO setting to 1600 and exposure time to 60 seconds.  I can’t do that with the Lumix because I don’t have access to the ISO settings when I’m in starry night mode.  If I set the camera to manual mode (where I do have access to the ISO settings), I don’t have access to the exposure time.  The longest exposure time I have in manual mode is 1/8 seconds.

After I looked at the pictures in manual mode (ISO 1600, 1/8 seconds exposure), I notice that there are a lot of noise.  I think they’re trying to hide the fact that the Lumix is very noisy in high ISO mode so they made it not selectable when you’re using long exposures.

So I guess I’ll get myself a new camera first.  I’ve narrowed the choices down to the Canon XSi.  It had good reviews as a “regular” camera and it is also good for astrophotography.  So now I need to read all about camera, lens and how to take good pictures.

Here are more pictures from another night of observing in Montana.  First, a scenic moon shot to pass the time.

Scenic moonshot from West Yellowstone, ISO 250, f/4.9, 1/124 second

The next thing I wanted to do is to take a picture of a constellation closest to the North celestrial pole to see if it would minimize star trails.  The obvious target is the little dipper seeing that the North star (Polaris) is the last star of the handle.  So I set up the camera and took this:

Little dipper from West Yellowstone, ISO 100, f/3.3, 60 seconds exposure

The little dipper is not a very bright constellation, so it is a little hard to see in the picture.  The little dipper is very near the center of frame, slightly above and to the right of the tree.  Here is a zoomed in picture of the little dipper.

Little dipper from West Yellowstone, ISO 100, f/4.5, 60 seconds exposure.

The picture is zoomed in optically in the camera and not a crop and zoom from the first picture.  There are hardly any star trails in this picture even though it is zoomed and the exposure is set to 60 seconds.  The problem seems to be that the little dipper is just a bit too faint and needs more exposure time.  I would have liked to try 120 seconds but my Lumix camera has a maximum exposure time of 60 seconds.  It is still a pretty good picture.

Big and little dipper from West Yellowstone, ISO 100, F/3.3, 60 seconds exposure.

I decided to take a picture of both the big and little dipper in the same frame.  So I moved to another angle and took the picture above.  The big dipper is obviously on the lower left of the frame.  The little dipper is harder to spot because it is so much more faint.  You can locate the little dipper by drawing a line through the right most 2 stars of the big dipper’s pan.  The line will intersect the little dipper’s handle.  Don’t forget that the little dipper is upside down where as the big dipper is right side up.

I was in Yellowstone for a week and stayed in West Yellowstone most of the time.  They did not exaggerate one bit when they call Montana “Big Sky” country.  The skies are blue, cloudless and you almost see from one end of the horizon to the other end.  I spent a few nights outside with my camera and the Tasco.  The nights were clear and dark and you can easily see the Milky Way across the entire sky.  I was lucky enough to have a clear field to observe about a block from my rental.

My personal viewing site in West Yellowstone

There wasn’t much I could do until the sun goes down (at 9:30pm), so I took a few scenic shots of the moon.

Scenic moon shot from West Yellowstone, ISO100, f/4.6, 1/49sec.

And a closer shot from the same angle.

Scenic moon shot from West Yellowstone, ISO125, F/4.8, 1/60sec.

After the sun had set, I wanted to see if I could get better fixed tripod astrophotography here.  So I pointed my camera towards the Big Dipper and took a series of pictures.  Here’s the best one out of all of them.

Big Dipper at West Yellowstone, DMC-TZ5, ISO 100, f/3.3, 60 second exposure.

The picture turned out great.  I was able to use a longer exposure because I was pointing near the North celestrial pole.  This picture was taken with a 60 seconds exposure, the maximum allowed on the Lumix.

There are more pictures on the way, but they must be cropped and touched up first.