Hunting the Hunter
Inspired by Steph’s picture of Orion and prodded by him to get out and do something, I headed out into the frozen night to track down An Sealgair Mor (The Great Hunter), Orion. First I needed to find out how to set the long exposure on the camera, a simple Canon PowerShot A560, using this page. So following Steph’s 10s exposure, I caught Orion rising over the distant glow of Mallaig in the SE. Back inside I messed with the lighting levels in Photoshop Elements to come up with this:
The bright star on the far left is Procyon in Canis Major
Then I managed to get The Pleiades too:
with Aldebaran between the two. Sirius wasn’t yet above the horizon or it was lost in the eerie glow of Mallaig. Next up was The Plough:
I was amazed with what I could do with a wee digital camera and very little Photoshop know-how. In fact, the lighting levels were the first settings I messed with and it looks gorgeous! I think the Moon may be next.
January 9th, 2010 at 12:44 am
See, I told you that compacts are fine for this sort of thing. You’ve got great results!
At this rate you’ll soon be up to stacking multiple frames to reduce the background noise and bring out the fainter features before the Photoshopping stage, then your amazement will go up another level.
Addicted yet?
January 9th, 2010 at 8:46 am
Great photos. Now I definitely can’t do that with my phone’s camera!
January 9th, 2010 at 10:50 am
yes, although the originals show lots and lots of stars, the noise is horrendous. Stacking? hmmm but the stars had visibly moved between exposures, as expected! so I suppose the stacking software can line them all up through the frames anyway. Addicted? def! Thanks for the prod
January 9th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
Really nice X
January 12th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Love the first shot with the Mallaig lights…excellent..!
Must have a swatch at my camera and see what it can do now