Night sky photography with only DSLR and Tripod

I recently traveled to my village and got stuck here due to a countrywide lockdown.
Luckily I had my DSLR with me and a good sturdy tripod with it.  Being a village I also have the opportunity to be in a lesser light-polluted location of the planet. So I explored the possibility to do deep-sky photography with only available hardware and software.

Talking about the software I used only opensource software named Stellarium, DeepSkyStacker, and DarkTable and NightSky mobile app. The hardware used is Smartphone, Sony alpha 6000 with the kit lens and a tripod. 

My first target was the Milkey Way. 

Here are the steps:

1. Find a suitable time using Stellarium, make sure there is no Moon in the sky and the Milkey Way is as much verticle as possible.

2. Check the weather forecast for possible clouds or rain, keep track of the weather frequently.

3. Learn the manual controls of the camera you own. 

4. On the date and time suggested by Stellarium, keep the camera in manual mode, zoom out as much as possible, set the focus to infinity and adjust it so the stars are in focus, you can do this by taking sample images and zooming in to check the focus accuracy. 

5. Once all is set, keep the shutter speed to around 3 seconds as more than this will cause star trails (due to the earth's rotation star will move from its position in the image). Make sure to shoot in RAW mode. You can google how to do these settings for your camera model.

5. Keep the ISO to around 3200, adjust it and take some sample images and check if they look correct.

6. If your camera has an inbuilt intervalometer then use it otherwise take as many shots as possible. Taking 150 to 200 shots will produce good results.

7. Open the night sky app or any free mobile app that can show you the Milkey Way position.

8. Before taking all these, take few sample photos, zoom these and see if they look nice and focussed, otherwise adjust the ISO and shutter speed settings. The more the shutter speed more light will come in, and the lower ISO you can use. It's better to be between 1600 to 3200.

9. Now finally you can take the shots and make sure not to move the tripod setup as much as possible. 

10. Few options are if your camera has a mobile app that allows you to remotely control the camera use it as the camera will not shake due to the click. Otherwise, you can also use a 2-second timer on the camera. 

11. Once you are done taking the pictures do following close the cap of the mirror and make sure it's dark and keep the camera settings (ISO, shutter speed, etc) same and take around 10 to 20 photos these are called bias frames. Now make the shutter speed to the lowest possible value for your camera and then again take 10 to 20 photos called dark frames.

12. Now remove the camera cap, add white paper in front of the camera lens and put a light source in front, and again take 10 to 20 photos called bright frames.

These additional images (dark frames, bias frames, and bright frames will help to remove the camera lens noise levels). It's also better to do this before taking actual photos if time permits.

Now the final part is to use Deep Sky Stacker (DSS) software (which only works on Windows PC) to combine all these images into a single image. For example, if you have taken 200 images of 4 seconds of exposure time, then you have a total exposure time of 800 seconds or 13.33 minutes.

Transfer all the images to your computer and open DSS and click select picture files, select all the actual images in your computer, make sure they are only the Milkey Way images and do not include the initial out-of-focus images and dark or other frames. Right-click and check all images.

Next select bias frames, bright frames, and dark frames. 

Now click on Register checked images and select stacking parameters as needed.

Finally stack the images which will create an autosave.tif image which is a combined image of all the frames.

Now open Darktable software which is an open-source alternative to popular photo editing software. 

Select Import from the file and select the autosave.tif file.

Now add the following filters to the image: 

1. Base curve to Sony Alpha like (select it for your camera)

2. adjust exposure and dark curves

3. denoise 

4. highlight reconstruction

Finally, you have your first Milkey Way pic. Here is a sample picture (single picture) without processing :)

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