Capturing the night sky

Capturing the night sky is one of the most challenging aspects of photography. In fact, it has its own area of photography aptly named "astrophotography" - the combination of the words "astronomy" and "photography," respectively. I got introduced to astrophotography by chance in 2007. In October of that year, there was a comet that exploded in the night sky and I took my first crude pictures of that celestial event. The image above, is the latest in a series of captures I've been working on, captured last night. Featured is NGC 4565, a spiral galaxy seen edge-on in the constellation Coma Berenices, at a distance of anywhere between 30 and 50 million light years. In essence, it's the oldest photograph I've ever captured. The light from this galaxy took between 30 and 50 million years to reach us, since light travels at a speed of 5.9 TRILLION miles in one year (or one light year). To capture this incredible vista, I used a 10-inch Meade LX200 Classic telescope, and a Nikon D5500 set at ISO3200. Guiding the way was a 12mm illuminated crosshair eyepiece in a 60mm guide scope. Exposure settings were 1 minute, with sixty captured over a little more than an hour's course of time (each exposure had a five-second delay between them, to allow the sensor to cool between exposures). Processing involved loading each of the 60 "light frames" into Deep Sky Stacker, where they were stacked with calibration frames to remove gradients and noise. After that, the final product in Deep Sky Stacker was imported to Adobe, where in both Photoshop and Lightroom, the final touches were made. Capture time was an hour, however processing this took much longer. When you see an image like this, you can bet that at least a full day was spent processing. And it's time well spent