If you look at my flickr photostream, you may notice that more and more shots of the night sky are appearing. I’m trying my hand at astrophotography, and I’ve learned a lot since December 2010 when I started. The first is how to use Photoshop “Open Files into Stack” to get a number of source images loaded into a single Photoshop document and automatically aligned. Next is ticking the box for “Automatically create Smart Object from layers”. This allows you to change the stack blend mode at will. Using the median setting helps reduce noise much better than other products, and deals nicely with hot pixels.

Now that I know how to stack, I want to tackle star trail photography. I think I can use the built in intervalometer on the D7000 to do this for me (do lots of 30 second exposures 1 second apart) – I need to try this next time I’m free at night and the sky is clear. Part of the trouble is even a basic image takes 30 or 40 minutes to capture, and at least that again to process and see if you did it right.