Hello fellow AstroBin users!

I am a returning a user and I decided to come back to post much of my work for the past 10 years.

I enjoy nature photography, particularly astrophotography. Here, I have posted many of my astrophotography projects that I have worked on for the last decade, both tracked and untracked. All of the photos that I have posted were done with camera lenses (no telescope). I started in untracked astrophotography and then later switched to using a sky tracker. I even had one of my photos published in an astronomy magazine! However,  I switched back to untracked astrophotography because I found that I was able to achieve similar results with wide angle lenses by using higher ISOs and stacking more images. I also prefer the simplicity of a camera on a tripod. I also found that at higher focal lengths with short exposures, I was able bring out star colours. Although my current astrophotogrpahy methods are not optimized for deep sky astrophotography, I can still scratch the surface of what's out there beyond the Milky Way. I also really enjoy solar astrophotography because the Sun is always changing and light pollution is not an issue.

You will notice that I don't have any details about my photos posted. I just don't have time go through all of them to get the exact information, but here are some general details. I use a Canon Rebel EOS T3. I currently own several Canon lenses (10-18 mm, 24 mm, 50 mm, 18-55 mm, 55-250 mm, 75-300 mm) and a Sigma 150-500 mm lens. Now, instead of a star tracker, for wide angle work, I piggyback my camera on my Sky-Watcher 102 mm AZ-mounted refractor and use an illuminated reticle eyepiece for aiming. I essentially use the telescope as the viewfinder, take a sequence of photos and readjust after a certain number. I came up with this method after using a 32 mm normal eyepiece to aim and adjust the telescope this way. Here's an example of the result of the technique applied under a dark sky. In this case, "untracked" also means "manually tracked" because I made the adjustments over the course of 150 6s exposures (ISO 6400, 50 mm lens):



Deneb

And here's the same image, combined with a red filter + RGB images that I took from my backyard totalling about 257 exposures:



North America Nebula Composite

For photo processing, I currently use Darktable, GIMP, ASTAP and sometimes Siril on macOS. For many years when I started, I used to stack images manually because I could not find stacking software suitable for my needs. Manual stacking was tedious and I didn't find it practical to stack more than about 30 images. But I still use the technique in situations where my images will not stack in ASTAP or Siril and the number of images required for processing is under 30. Here are a couple of images where I manually stacked photos and is my default processing method for the Sun, star trails and cases where there are too few stars captured at high focal lengths. The Sun is at 700 mm and Venus at 500 mm focal lengths.


The Sun


Venus

For this image, I stacked about 250+ images in ASTAP. I wouldn't stack that many manually!



Mars

I have also written astronomy software over the years for my personal use. One that I use daily checks the current Solar Dynamics Observatory images in various wavelengths. I use it to check how active the Sun is before solar observing. Yes, I actually look through my telescope still! If you are interested in the code for the program, please message me privately.

Thanks for reading!

Steven Fanutti
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-fanutti/
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