The First Night Sky Object I photographed - Orion Constellation

So there you have it folks, the kick-off to my stupid astrophotography. For the past few weeks, I've been watching a lot of astrophotographers teaching others the basic things about photography to advanced image processing for post-production.

So getting inspired after watching all this videos is not new to me. But this is something I personally like that this thing never got bored in a while, which usually occurs with other stuffs. So let's talk about the picture and the story behind it.

Orion Constellation

I was watching YouTube since I can't play Valorant as my wifi was down. It was around 4:30 am that I decided to give my eyes some rest and kept my mobile down. But before going to sleep, I have this habit of going to my balcony and look around. I did that and I looked up to see a bright shiny object in the sky.

So I took my mobile back and used this app called "Stellarium Mobile" and started to look at the sky using the app. And that's when I realized I was looking at the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius. One another easy way to notice Sirius is with the flickering colors when it is low in the sky. It flickers more than any stars in the sky.

Sirius, aka Alpha Canis Majoris, aka Dog star

So once I confirmed that it was Sirius, I wanted to take a picture of it. Of course my telescope is still in my Amazon wish list sadly. But I own my brother's DSLR that he left home(for me ;p). I'll mention the specs later in the post. I took the cam and used my window frame as my tripod and pictured this as handheld picture will result in a lot of shakes and distorted image.

Once I'm convinced with this shot after taking literally 45-50 images of the same star on the same spot, I decided to sit on my balcony and chill for a while. Bored, I pointed the camera at the sky and that's when I spotted a group of stars on my camera screen.

So I took my mobile, opened Stellarium again and tried to find out the name of these stars. That's when I found these stars are form a constellation called Orion Constellation and it is one of the most easily recognizable and noticed constellation in the night sky. It can be seen throughout the world.

Orion Contellation with the stars.

            I was unable to get the full constellation due to sunrise and my camera battery died too.

The warrior shape formed by the constellation.

Some facts about Orion Constellation:

• It is a prominent constellation located on the celestial equator. 
• Its brightest stars are blue-white Rigel and red Betelgeuse.
• It ranks 26th out of 88 known constellations based on size, covering an area of 594 square degrees.
• Orion is used as a guide in finding other stars.
• It has 7 main stars.
• Deep space objects in this constellation are: Orion nebula, horsehead nebula, witch head nebula.
• In the northern hemisphere, Orion symbolizes the return of winter.

Orion's seven brightest stars form a distinctive hourglass-shaped asterism, or pattern, in the night sky. Four stars - Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix and Saiph - form a large roughly rectangular shape, in the centre of which lies the three stars of Orion's belt - Alnitak, Alnilam and Minataka. Descending from the 'belt' is a smaller line of three stars, Orion's sword(the middle one is in fact, a nebula; Orion Nebula). These features are highlighted in the above images.

My kit:

Camera: Nikon D3300

Lens: Nikon AF-P NIKKOR 18-55mm 1:3.5-5.6G

I didn't use any color correction, stacking and other processes since it was dawn already when I started taking the pictures. So I thought just to capture the outline of the constellation, just like as shown in the picture. In case of deep sky objects, we need to do all post-capturing work to enhance the image

So there you have it, the story of my first astrophotography. See you guys in the next post.

Peace.