I broke my wife's Nikon D60 making this picture :( Twelve pictures, 2 minutes each, then the camera threw up the message "Error: Press shutter release button again." Which did nothing to solve the problem. I was using an old Nikon 200mm f/4 telephoto lens mounted on top of a Meade 8" LX200 'classic' telescope. This camera has probably taken 40000 pictures over the past 8 years. Kids, airplanes, animals, astronomy. Lots of use.
When I stopped grumbling about the camera, I used a program called DeepSkyStacker to align and add up all the pictures and adjust the contrast a bit. That's the first picture. The glow in the upper corners of the picture are from the camera's sensor exposing itself. These are two minute exposures, at ISO 1600. The sensor is warm and it picks up the heat from its own circuitry. You'll never see this in daytime shots at 1/200 of a second. Look carefully, there's more than just stars in this picture.
Then I used web-based tool called Astrometry.net to identify the stars and other items in the picture. That's the second picture. Take a look, a lot of the smudges are galaxies.
When I stopped grumbling about the camera, I used a program called DeepSkyStacker to align and add up all the pictures and adjust the contrast a bit. That's the first picture. The glow in the upper corners of the picture are from the camera's sensor exposing itself. These are two minute exposures, at ISO 1600. The sensor is warm and it picks up the heat from its own circuitry. You'll never see this in daytime shots at 1/200 of a second. Look carefully, there's more than just stars in this picture.
Then I used web-based tool called Astrometry.net to identify the stars and other items in the picture. That's the second picture. Take a look, a lot of the smudges are galaxies.