M3ta7h3ad, I've just had a look on YouTube and there's a LOT of astro photography vids on there, can't see the wood for the trees if I'm honest. Do you have a link to the one you're talking about? it sounds really interesting.

This one: http://youtu.be/11d-JbxXGAA

I recommend the restraunt in porthgain if your out that way.
Porthgain is worth a trip even if your not hungry.

without a driven mount, it'll be a LOT easier to get deep sky objects with the 40 1.8 than a telephoto. Two reasons for this:

1. wider angle lets you use longer individual exposures

2. f/1.8. I don't know what teles you have available, but that's a good stop faster than the fastest long lens I know of, and 2 or more stops faster than most.

This adds up to a lot more light gathering per frame. This is important because although you'll be using stacking to bring out the faint objects, you still need there to be SOME difference between object and non-object pixels. Exposure stacking is a great tool, but like most post processing it has limitations compared to gathering the photons in one big go.

The Milky Way makes an exciting target for shortish exposures with foreground interest

Pick your targets carefully, some deep sky objects are actually HUGE and you don't really need a telephoto to photograph them. The great nebula in Orion and the Andromeda galaxy leap to mind. Both are larger than the full moon, the Orion nebula quite a lot larger.

You'll also want to consider a dark frame. My camera does dark frame subtraction by default on long exposures, but that doubles the length of acquisition as it captures a second exposure of the same length with the shutter closed. I usually turn this option off and use a separate dark frame taken with the lens cap on. That way I only have to take one per length of exposure/ISO combination I'm using. I assume you're shooting raw, if your usual raw converter doesn't support dark frame subtraction, I have previously used UFRAW for this purpose, and it now appears Rawtherapee also supports it with the latest version, although I haven't tried that yet.

good luck and have fun

washout for astro  maybe, but the landscapes turned out pretty good, and the clouds make the sky more interesting so not all bad!

HDR + ND Grad. Still learning the ropes with Photoshops "Merge to HDR Pro" tool. I'm thinking the second one would have worked better as two separate HDRs, (sky+sun, and sea and rocks) layered and masked together. I just couldn't seem to get the sky "right" without the sun getting washed out.

Yeah, I hung around for 10-20 minutes until pretty much any colour had disappeared from the sky. On the walk back I realised I'd have been better off photographing away from the sun as the cliffs were still fairly lit up and colourful, oh well!

One thing I'm noticing is that when I've got several HDR shots from the same "set", If I flickr through shot 1, shot 2, shot 3 etc, I think they improve, either due to the light being better, or just the fact that I've progressively tweaked the HDR settings!

Girlfriend went out with friends last night and I was the taxi. Ended up getting back home at about 2-2.30. Around here they turn the streetlights off after midnight, I was surprised by how dark it was. Still enough light pollution, but I guess it's a good way to practice technique instead of wasting a trip out somewhere more remote


Astro by Chris_Moody, on Flickr

Stacked shot. 15 light frames 5 dark.
 
Manual mode. F2.8. ISO 1600. 17mm. 20 second exposures. I couldn't be arsed working out the 400/17 so assumed it'd be close to, or slightly above 20 seconds for exposure before star trails. I also used a radio remote control to take the shots (I think if I do this again I'll hook up the tablet computer to the camera and use an app to just interval shoot).

I used deep sky stacker and the RAW files. Pretty much just loaded the light and dark frames and then just processed it as was. I then used Adobe CameraRaw to post process a tad to adjust contrast and colour a bit.

The stars are likely out of focus as I couldn't really tell whether it was in focus due to light. I also recalled something about you don't focus to the limits of the infinity distance, so I focused as far as I could, and then tweaked it back a fraction. Probably a mistake!