I’m quite happy to finally have gotten the chance to play around with a bit of astrophotography.
As I’m still quite new to darktable I’d love to see what is possible given the provided raw file.
I’ve tried to make the milky way pop a bit more with by adding an extra exposure module with a multiply blend mode. (trick picked up from this forum of course ! )
I quickly ran into somehow creating a bit of unwanted color shadings as well as some magenta stars though
Tried to somewhat get rid of the magenta stars by just desaturating magenta a bit via color zones.
Nice photograph. I know nothing about astro-photography, so I am sure others will achieve far better results. I added a desaturated layer in overlay mode and then minor tweaks of the base layer using curves. Converted to tiff using Filmulator (default settings) and then in GIMP.
acc. to the theory, your 20s should be o.k. (500/focal length), however, you see a bit of star trail, so I’d try 15s next time and I am convinced, your sensor is as good, you could try ISO 3200 (yes it will be way darker, however… NIKONS are ISOinvariant and it may preserve the color of the stars better)
FWIW (and if someone in the future reads this ) I think this is great advice! I double-checked some stars when zooming in as far as possible and could see that quite a few of them were overexposed in RAW!
So next time I’ll make sure to keep the ISO lower!
! )
