Astrophotography on the Farm (Edition II)

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 12-24mm f4 lense, Nikon SB-700 Speedlight, Slik Pro 500DX & Joby Gorillapod tripods, Viltrox Remote & an led flashlight.

In the middle of July, the phase of the moon was new and the sky was clear one night so I headed out to a cut oat field to try to capture some more astrophotography images. On this night, the Milky Way was slightly visible so I was excited sitting up my camera equipment.

The above equipment was used with the lense set at 12mm, f4 and manual focus. The camera was in RAW, ISO 1600 and manual mode. I set the shutter speed to bulb so I could use my remote to hold down the shutter for a desired time length. The lengths of time for these images were 30 or 90 seconds. The SB-700 Speedlights were used to light the row of oats and the pitch fork and they were in manual mode and I trigged them via the flash ready indicator button.

In Capture NX-D, I changed the exposure compensation, picture control and shadow slider. The exposure compensation was increased by 1/3 or ½, picture control to either sport or vivid setting and shadow slider increased to 25. NX-D underneath the noise reduction settings has an Astro Noise Reduction so I clicked on that to apply that to the RAW files. Using the D90 and its older sensor, noise can be a problem on these types of images.

In PSE 11, I first straightened the images if needed followed by a curves layer masks to help with the visibility of the stars or foreground. I also discovered that using the lighten blending mode can help when merging files together that are exposed differently. The final step was using the high pass filter to sharpen the tiff files.

I also created two star trail images by combining 11 or 17 images into one stacked image by using the program StarStaX. I had that number of images by using the Viltrox remote and taking 90 second exposures every 5 seconds which allowed StarStaX to stack them all together.

Looking forward to the next clear night without a bright moon, one thing I’ve learned this summer is if the conditions are right for astrophotography, you better be out because it sure doesn’t happen very often.

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