In 2022, I bought my first ever real camera: the Nikon D5300. This was inspired by my desire to dip my toes into astrophotography, the hobby of imaging the night sky. While I had done some of this before, it was just with my phone’s camera, so the results were very noisy. But with this new camera, I can do a little more…
With just my smartphone…
My first ever long-exposure with the Samsung Galaxy Note 9The Milky Way from my backyard in Illinois, taken also with the Note 9. Unfortunately I had to drop the saturation to 0 due to immense noise, which you can still clearly seeA moonless night, taken also with the Note 9
Now with a real camera!
Nikon D5300 with kit 18-140mm zoom lens. I don’t have a star tracker yet!Orion’s Nebula, taken from the center of Oklahoma City on a near full moon, 30 minutes of data, untracked, processed with StarNetV2 and GIMPMilky Way core taken from Oklahoma with the D5300, 4 minutes of data, processed in SequatorTaken the same night as the previous photo, 1.5 minutes stacked, processed similarlyA few months later, this is untracked with 177x10s exposuresZooming into the core, we can see the Lagoon Nebula alongside the Trifid Nebula. This is still untracked with 800×2.5s exposuresNow we start to get into the big upgrade territory. This is 90x40s exposures tracked with the SWSA and using a nicer 300mm lens. Still a a little grainy since it’s not much data, but a really cool amount of detail in the Andromeda GalaxyNot much time spent on this, just a 30x60s integration of the Pleiades Cluster at 180mm. This was shot from a Bortle 2 zone just outside of Boise City in the Oklahoma panhandleThis is my prize possession to date. A compilation of the Flame, Horsehead, and Orion Nebula all just below Orion’s Belt in the sky. This was shot from Black Mesa, a Bortle 1 zone. I was struggling with tracking, so this is 220x30s exposures, but the details that came out were still very impressive, especially from a stock DSLR and 55-300mm kit lens
