Diving head first... Astrophotography!

Canon T4i with new 300 mm telephoto lens

We'll I've thrown myself into the deep end again. This time its astrophotography... Struggling to get a successful image stack of any kind for the past three days. I've been trying my hand @ doing image stacking using my Canon T4i DSLR with static tripod setup pointed at some bright stars in city limits with very low expectations. I must be a crazy person - running out into the neighborhood in the middle of the night with my camera...

I just wanted to go through the motions and see if I could get a stack even if its ugly! I've used standard telephoto lenses @135mm and @300mm zoom and long exposures (5-15 seconds per shot) and attempted to combine with deepskystacker (using both dark's and lights). I tried on vega, denab, and arcturas as my focal spots because they stood out in the sky.


I've made mistakes and gained a lesson from each:

Arcturas - short exposure (1s)

(1) Arcturas - super duper cloudy - probably wasn't worth shooting at all, because i could barely make it out with my own eyes, and camera only picked up like 5 stars at most. Did it anyway cause I need to get my hands dirty. (lots of 1 second exposures) Probably didn't expose long enough to pick up anything meaningful.

Vega - too long an exposure (30s)

(2) Vega - a little better of a night partially cloudy - whisps of clouds went across some of the photos, but in hindsight all my photos were exposed too long (30 seconds) and the stars streaked. I also forgot to manually set it off of auto-iso for pretty much all the data.
(3) Denab - Clear night - visibility index was 23% (my gf told me from some app - no idea what) Neighbors turning on/off lights, i ignored this, and tried to move where in the neighborhood lights weren't directly blaring at the lens. Looking at the pictures, it seems obvious that I wasn't focused right. This was the first night i transition from the 18-135mm lens to the 75-300mm lens, so lots more zoom, but I guess cause I ddin't zoom in on the screen i couldn't tell that it wasn't focused...

Deneb - Focus it stupid!

Oooof! This is a slog. Regardless of throwing these stacks of 100- 170 photos into deepskystacker, I can't get it to produce a single stacked image it can never figure out how to combine more than one image? Can't fault the software when you have crappy input. I guess it can't register the pictures cause it can't find the stars? And so the journey continues...



PS - I just bought this EQ6-R Mount from Agena AstroProducts. It was a tough choice between agena and High Point Scientific. Simple fiscal difference made it simple. Probably going to shoot with my camera and these standard lenses while i hunt for the right Celestron EdgeHD... Wish me luck!

Git tipsheet

Great GIT tip sheet here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/git/comments/bwwqr3/git_cheat_sheet/


The following are git commands that I found useful:

To create a new branch with your existing content (you're already linked to a remote origin)
git checkout -b newbranchname

To see difference between branches:
git diff gitlogid file_that_you_want_to_see_diff

To merge two branches:
git merge

To look at git log more carefully:
git log --oneline --graph --all