My First Milky Way Photo

[JWebber]

I got a question, as I'm working to produce a similar shot. Was the color there before processing (but after stacking), or did you have to apply techniques in either DSS or Gimp to pull out the color? I wouldn't expect my shot to be as good as yours, but I would expect there to be at least some color. Right now it looks completely B&W.

The colour I got was pretty much there already (in fact, some of the colour was already apparent on the shots straight out of the camera). I did do some curves and saturation adjustments in DSS but that is about it. Have a look at this tutorial: My Quick DeepSkyStacker Tutorial « Flintstone Stargazing
I found it very helpful for the processing of my shot, although I did need to play around a little as it seems all pictures are slightly different so you would need to find what works for your shot. The basic idea is there though. I used his settings as a base and worked from there.

Just out of interests sake, are you using darks, flats and bias frames as well? I had darks and biases as well which I used the first time I tried to process the shots in DSS, but I didn't have much luck and in the one output that did look ok I also seemed to get a much more black and white image. My DSS skills are not very good though so I'm sure I was doing something wrong, but perhaps that's what's causing your problem as well. I actually found that just using 10 of my light frames gave me a better output to work with.

I hope you come right! Let us know how it turns out!

[CosmicFart]

Nice shot! Reminds me of being in Afghanistan.

[tilbrook]

A photo of our galaxy, the Milky Way, taken just outside our chalet at Crystal Springs Mountain Lodge in Mpumalanga, South Africa. It's amazing what a dark, clear sky can show (along with a little work on the computer). This is 10 photos that I took (each 30 seconds exposure time), stacked together, and then edited a bit in GIMP. My first real Milky Way shot!

That's a brilliant image of the Milky way!!

Looks natural and good processing too.

Cheers,

Justin.

[kevin sydney]

Nice work. More,Please !