We'll get you there unless we don't.
This is a simple over view of how we go about taking our photos and bringing out the details. it is in no way, shape, or form detailed.
Taking an astropicture itself is not any more difficult than taking vacation pictures. Depending on what you want it can vary from point and shoot to framing, lighting posing, special equipment, and the list goes on. Very good results can be had by taking short timed photographs of the night sky with simple cameras and setups. Timed exposures do require a solid mount. Anything longer than about 1/60 and you will introduce body movement into the picture. What you see on our pages range from photos of the moon with a handheld Canon 20D and 135mm lens to 4 hours of 3 minute exposures processed with software. I will attempt to describe the very basic process we use. For an in depth description there are a myriad of YouTube videos that you can spend days watching. The typical steps we go through are as follows: First we set up the telescope, attaching the camera and align the mount.This is begun just before dusk so we can see what we are doing with the final alignment done when Polaris is visible. This process takes about a half an hour to an hour. Once we are set up we select our target and send a command to the telescope mount to slew to it. Once we have our object centered we get it in focus by taking short photos as we refine the focus. After focus is achieved we set the timer on the camera to take a series of pictures. The timing we choose is based upon the sky conditions and brightness of object we are imaging. Darker skies (which we never have) can take longer exposures. In our dark challenged skies we can take from 2 to 3 minute exposures before the surrounding city lights wash out our view if the moon isn't bright. Otherwise we are restricted to about 90 to 120 seconds. The dimmer the object we are photographing, the more exposures we will want to get. On the M42 nebula in Orion we have taken up to 4 hours of 3 minute exposures, which gives a total of 180MB of data. After we have captured all the photos we can get for the evening we use a few different software programs to process the pictures depending on what we are photographing. For simplicity I will only describe one program and that is Pixinsight. This is actually a suite of programs that you step through the process with. Again, the very basics are to first analyze your data (thats what "they" refer to the pictures as) for quality, rejecting the poorer captures. They may be due to varying sky conditions, jets flying through the picture, satellites through the picture, clouds crossing through, or any of a bunch of other things. Not that I have ever tripped over the mount in the night and bumped the alignment. That causes a problem I'm told. :-) Once we have a stack of good photos we use another process that scans each photo and aligns the stars so each of the different photos have the stars in the same pixel locations. The next process I don't fully understand how it works, I just use it. It analyzes each picture with some fancy algorythms to draw the best out of each picture and come up with one super quality photo that can then have some additional process done to draw out the deep beauty that is buried in the photo. I won't go into detail but the various steps include removing background distortions, calibrating the colors, removing picture noise, sharpening the photo, and several more. If you have made it this far, you may be interested in a tutorial done by Astrodude on YouTube that takes you through the basic steps. He is where I have begun to learn the basics and is one of my go to guys. After this processing you can use a photo editor to enhance color and edit the photos. And that my friends is how we do it in a nutshell.