Hey /r/astrophotography!

I'm lucky enough to have access to the summit of Mauna Kea on occasion this week, and wanted to try my hand at some photos of the Orion Nebula using only my DSLR and telephoto.

I've a Nikon D5100, which has pretty poor resolution (only 16 MP), so it's difficult to zoom by cropping afterwards. Hence, I'd like to zoom all the way in with my telephoto, take a ton of frames, and stack them with DSS afterwards.

So I tried that tonight. Unfortunately, the results were less than satisfactory. You can view one of the better frames here. It definitely looks neat, but it's definitely not what I'm looking for...

Here's what I did and the reasoning I used, as well as a few thoughts for making things better for another shot.

• Nikon D5100
• Tripod (Cheap, but has been steady for me up until now)
• Nikon f/4.5-5.6 70-300 mm Lens
• I upped the ISO to 24000 and took a few test shots zoomed all the way in on the nebula to get the focus down. Then I lowered the ISO to 3200. Aperture was wide open at 5.6.
• Rule of 500 says I should be able to integrate each shot for 500/(1.6*300) at 300 mm, or ~1 second. I erred on the side of caution and went for an exposure time of 1/1.6 seconds.
• I set up my camera's intervalometer to take one frame every 2 seconds for 4 minutes.
• I'd then re-point the camera to re-center the nebula in the frame to correct for the sky drift.
• It was quite windy where I was.

The resulting images are, as you can see, affected quite a bit by what I can only imagine is camera movement.

For the next night, I thought I'd try the following to reduce the camera shake:

• Find a more shielded area out of the wind
• Hang some weight from the tripod
• Using either 1) exposure delay to delay the shutter by ~ 1" after the mirror locks up or 2) using Live-View and my remote to lock the mirror and continuously take exposures.

Do ya'll have any other thoughts that might help out? Have I missed something?

I know this isn't quite the right equipment for this, but I think it'd be neat to get something cool out of what I have on hand, and take advantage of the good observing conditions!

Cheers!