It was a clear, cold night in the suburbs. I can typically make out most of the major constellations, and other random stuff, and if the moon is down, a fair number more. The moon was about 1/2 this night, and I figured it was worth a shot. I took 9 3-second exposures with a 50mm/1.4 lens on a Nikon D300. The pictures themselves were pretty good, showing several times more stars than I could see with the naked eye. But then my friend showed me how to use DeepSkyStacker. This program basically does some fancy noise reduction to get rid of the haze of each shot and make the stars really stand out. The results speak for themselves.
