First piece of the puzzle

Couple weeks ago I was searching internet for new subjects to photograph in the night sky. Ive tried to find one are that has alot of large nebulas in tight group for a panorama. I ended up with constellation of Auriga. Last night the clouds cleared for couple of hours so I managed to get some data to play with. It isnt as good as I would like it to be, because my Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 suffers from missaligned elements and stars on the left side are out of focus. I probably have to shoot this again with 105mm macro wich has terrific image quality from corner to corner compared to 120-300.

The downside is that with such a short focal lenght there is not of pixels for zooming in the good thing is that I can get consistently 2minutes with 300mm lens. With 105mm it would be 6 minute subs and no tracking errors if everything is normal!
I would like to complete this with my 300mm but just isnt an option until I get it repaired, if its even repairable... :(
Anyways, here is first try. I probably need around 8 images with 105mm macro to complete my panorama. Might add this are as a separate image to it aswell.

Largest and brightest red nebula on the upper right is IC405, below that is IC410 on the far left surrounded by IC417 is star cluster M38. With just one hour of data I am suprised how well the extremely faint dark nebulas appeared on the upper right corner.

Heart and Soul of the universe

Couple nights ago despite the lunar glare I tried to capture my first light of the Heart and Soul nebulae. Expecially Soul nebula is very faint and I couldnt see them in the unprocessed images at all, after stacking 25x2min exposures I could see some faint detail on the far right where the brighter parts of  Heart nebula is.

In post-processing I worked on to bring out more detail, after adjusting white balance and curves I tried new tecnique to bring out more detail. In the Lightroom color tab pulled red and orange saturation and lightness up and blue saturation down about 50%. That worked very well!

Heart and Soul nebulae
Canon EOS 6D | Sigma 120-300mm f/2.8 | Astrotrac
25x2min | f/2.8 | ISO 800

Tutorial: Using Hugin and EnfuseGUI for astrophotography

Hugin is often used for stiching panoramas, it does it very well. Alignment is precise, vignette removal is superior compared to anything Ive used.
These two features make it the best software to align image stacks - for example astrophotography. Here is how I process my photos step-by-step.

When you lauch Hugin for the first time, it looks like this. This is simplified version of it and what we want is to enable them all. On the top left select Interface and change that to Expert mode.
Now go to folder you have your images, convert them to 16bit tiff at original size and resolution and do not make any adjustments in any software before! Stack first, edit later is the general rule.



Drag and drop the images in Hugin, after they have loaded in the Photos tab click Create control points, left corner underneath the file list. Hugin starts calculating the control points automatically, 99% of the photos Ive processed this is enough so you dont have to set control points manually. However if you dont get the alignment right you can do this in the control points tab simply by adding control points in the image pairs. Make sure they are a match.
But for now dont mess with them, press Control + T and after the optimizer has finished click ok.

Preview window.

Now lets see what your stack looks like: Press Control + P for preview. There is alot of empty space around the actual images, to fix this press Centre in the upper left corner and then update the preview with update button. Now just close the preview window and go to Sticher tab.
Click on the Calculate Field-of-view, after that has finished click on Calculate optimal size and after that Fit crop to images. By doing this Hugin calculates original size, field of view and crops out empty areas to speed out stiching.

In the Sticher tab (panorama outputs) deselect Exposure correction, low dynamic range. Move down to Remapped images and select No Exposure correction, low dynamic range. After that move down to Processing. Select Nona Options. A small window pops up, deselect Save cropped images so Hugin doesnt do unnecesary images wich you dont need.
Then press stich and let Hugin do its magic, make sure you save the images in diffrent folder so you dont mix up the tiffs you just put in. You end up with bunch of files, the filenames are probably something like _MG_xxxx - _MG_xxxx_exposure_layers_0000. Dont worry about them, now open EnfuseGUI and just drag and drop images in there.

EnfuseGUI

In the EnfuseGUI set bracket count to as many images you have. On the right side there is Fusion options, there is many ways to do this but I prefer these settings.

Then just press Enfuse it! on the right side of the file list. EnfuseGUI creates new folder called Enfused in the same folder where your images are.
Open folder and you will find a tiff file on the root. Import this to Lightroom, Photoshop or any other program for further processing. If you dont find image in there youre probably out of memory, stack less images using same method in the EnfuseGUI and after youve stacked them all as separate files add stacked images for final stacking.

Settings

EnfuseGUI overview

Downloads:
Both of these softwares are free to use, download Hugin here and EnfuseGUI here.

I see red

Hydrogen is most abundant material in the universe, astrophotographers often see red nebulas in their images. Expecially emission nebulas are often red or magenta. The color is caused by Hydrogen-alpha: a specific deep-red spectral line of 656.28 nm.
Constellation of Cyqnus has alot material to photograph. Large and bright emission nebulas like North-America nebula are easy targets even for unmodified cameras. You can get a good looking image with just 30 second exposure time, however the more you gather light the better your images turn out. The California nebula in the constellation of Perseus is also worth a try.

The California nebula glows red because of hydrogen and a really hot star near by called Menkib. It has gotten its name from it shape that resembles the state of California.

The California nebula

Our intergalactial neighbour

We often think that our neighbour is just down the street or behind the fence in our backyard.
Last night I had a glimpse of our cosmic neighbour.

Say hi to The Andromeda galaxy - a spiral galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda. The galaxy itself is largest in the local group and relatively close to The Milky Way galaxy, the galaxy where you are probably reading this, constantly moving through space on a tiny mudball called Earth. If you are somewhere else, you have pretty damn good internet connection.
Andromeda galaxy is very easy to observe, even with naked eye you can see the brightest parts. Binoculars or small telescope makes this even more easier. You can find it by scanning the area between Cassiopeia and Pegasus. Photographing it requires tracking mount, in this case I used Astrotrac.
Andromeda also has satelite galaxies around it. Up on the right side is a bright Messier 110, a dwarf elliptical galaxy. Directly below it underneath Andromeda itself is another dwarf elliptical galaxy called Messier 32.

Light from 2,5 million light-years away

The Seven Sisters

Messier 45, Pleiades, Seven sisters... this tiny dot in the sky has became famous. Even Subaru has created their logo based on this star cluster.
Plejades is a relatively new, open star cluster. Only about 115 million years old, it may sound like a huge amount of time but in the universe thats just happened yesterday. Pleiades gets its color because the stars are very hot. Hotter the star, more it appears blue.

The Seven Sisters

When I was photographing this, also saw some nice auroras. Luckily the skies didnt turn completely green so auroras didnt block out the light coming from Pleiades.
Check out a short timelapse of the auroras here!

Auroras over Finnish countryside - Can you find The Seven Sisters?