October Dispersed Camping Trip

Lawrence Greiner October 12, 2024

For the last two years in October I’ve taken a dispersed camping trip down to the Sand Dunes area for my last camping trip of the year. Last year I had not really started this journey into astrophotography (a few shots of the Milky Way and that was it) and had only brought my camera down to try some shots of the Milky Way over the Dunes, but while I was down there that year I also decided to try to take some star trail shots which can be viewed in nightscapes gallery as well as the Milky Way over the Dunes shot, since then I have fully embraced everything that has to do with astrophotography and have with the help of my father learned a lot. This year was very much different then last year and also different from just going out into my backyard to collect data on whatever object peaks my interest at the moment, because in my backyard I not only have a place to go retreat to when I’m taking multiple long exposure shots but I also have “unlimited” power to power the mount, camera, laptop, etc. Since I would not have one of the most important things available to me on this trip I had to come up with a solution that would enable me to still enjoy the dark skies of southern Colorado and take some amazing pictures. Looking on amazon and reading many reviews from other astrophotographers I decided on the Bluetti EB3A portable power station as this not only fit my budget but was also not big and bulky, it also has the benefit of allowing me to charge with AC, DC, or Solar. I barrowed a small extra solar panel from a friend so I could recharge the power station during the day. I calculated that based on what I needed to power that I would get a good 4 hours before I would have to recharge, I was way off with this calculation. After the first night of taking pictures and charging my phone and watch ~3 hours total of everything plugged in I still had about 60% left on the battery. I did decide to charge it back up with the solar the next day just to make sure it all worked. The second night went just as well as the first and on both nights I took some pictures of the sunset over Alamosa with the crescent moon and Venus along with the Heart and Soul Nebula.

Heart & Soul Nebula

Nikon D5100 stock

Nikkor 135mm lens

ISO 1600

f/5.6

iEXOS-100 PMC-Eight Equatorial Mount controlled by N.I.N.A

  • First Night
    • 60 light frames @ 120 seconds each
    • 20 dark, flat, and bias frames
  • Second Night
    • 30 light frames @ 120 seconds each
    • 20 dark, flat, and bias frames

Stacked and processed in Siril & GraXpert with some additional processing in Photoshop

Noise reduction done in Topaz AI.

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