Edinburgh Sky at Night - Orion, Christmas Day, 2014

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Orion

The Photos

The two photos above were taken at 11.15pm on Christmas Day 2014, three days after the new moon. It was a cold, clear night with no moon in the sky.

Both photos were 1-second time exposures, taken with a Canon EOS 6D camera with Canon 28-135 mm lens, set to 56mm.

- Photo 1 was at taken at 25,600 ISO: Photo 2 at 12,800 ISO. Both results looked similar, but I made Photoshop adjustments to levels, brightness and contrast in Photo 1 to bring out more stars.

- I was surprised just how many stars appeared. I counted about 350 on Photo 1 when displayed at the largest size - 2048 pixels high. That's far more than could be seen with the naked eye. The camera appears to have captured stars as faint as magnitude 6, possibly fainter***. Perhaps somebody will be able to check that and email me to let me know what they have found. ***Please also see 'Update' below

Prints

I've found that the image above and others that show bright stars against a dark background (such as these pictures of the whole sky taken with a fisheye lens) don't print well. Most of the stars cannot be seen on the print.

However by converting the picture to become a negative (e.g. using image>adjust>invert in Photoshop) an image with black stars against a white background is created, and this does print well.

Peter Stubbs, Edinburgh: January 5, 2014, updated January 6, 2014

Update

I've now compared this photo with a star map and found that stars all brightness down to and including magnitude 7 appear to have been recorded on this photo.

Peter Stubbs, Edinburgh: January 5, 2014, updated January 6, 2014