Album Night Shots and Star Trails

I've finally had the chance, during the current "Holiday Season" , to start to relearn an advanced software program "PixInsight" specifically designed for astrophotography.

These are the results using it to reprocess my last three outing's photos.

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Having only gotten a very basic beginner DSLR (NIKON D3400) at Costco recently with only the stock lenses thus far, I took it down this last weekend to play around with it and see what I could capture with it before looking at getting a wider 2.8 lens and so on.

Here's a couple shots from our camp on Cedar Mesa Sunday night. I only touched up the JPG copies with Google Photos. I did take RAW images too, but haven't sat down to really learn how to use LR/PS to really pull out the power of RAW yet.

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Orion:

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Looks pretty great for a kit lens and your first time. What did you use to light up the tent in that first shot?
 
MikeM said:
Looks pretty great for a kit lens and your first time. What did you use to light up the tent in that first shot?
Click to expand...

Thanks. I believe I had one of those Luci solar powered inflatable lanterns in there at the time. Obviously a bit too intense, so I'll have to go with something a little softer and less luminous, or just throw a shirt over it or something to dampen the glow down.
 
I had to see if the telescope would add to the superbluebloodmoon experience and while the shot was way too close for that, it did yield a neat shot. Blurry because the moon was low in the sky and the telescope is touchy in terms of focus but whoa! Magnification! I'll have to bust it out on the first half of the moon phase to see how horizon shadows look.

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I took a different approach shooting the lunar eclipse a bit ago. Because it was happening in the middle of the night here in Hawai'i, the moon was way too high in the sky to get anything decent or with a foreground, I just did a landscape shot including the moon.
I just went to my favorite viewpoint where you can see the glow of Halemau'uma'u crater in the distance and was happy to see some low lying fog at the crater bottom of Kilauea Iki crater. This shot was taken during the last quarter of the eclipse but I could barely get the moon in it.

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I was finally able to get out to my dark site again, on a night that was supposed to relatively mild, for March. It turned out to be the coldest night that I've been there . The only thing that made it tolerable, was the fact there wasn't a breath of wind.

M81/ M82

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Just a FYI - Glenn Randall has a new book out on taking night-sky photos - it's really good, though a bit pricey ($31 for ebook), the print version is coming out soon.
 
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