Orion over the trees

Tom Benedict

Astrophotography without a telescope, a tracking mount, or much of anything that you can't find in your everyday camera bag.

Hardware: Canon 20D, 24mm, ISO 800, a fixed tripod pointing roughly above my trees. All images captured as RAW.

Software: IRIS 5.53 and 5.21 (my goof), and Photoshop.

IRIS is a free astronomical processing program that, among other things, will take a sequence of images, identify star centroids for each one, generate an affine transformation to align the coordinate systems of the sequence of images, and align them all so you can stack them.

This was a stack of 23 10-second images taken wide open.

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