15 years olds taking pictures of stars...sure like that's going to happen

Let's be honest. How many of you have pointed your phones at the sky and wondered why none of the stars came up? Well I did and for the longest time. I thought that you needed, many things and things and skills that well fifteen year old didn't have. To be fair, I didn't really think about how pictures of the stars were taken, they were just there and it was taken by NASA's satellites or something. I mean I go to a really cool school so I should've known but still it was a pleasantly shocking surprise when I woke up in middle of the night and took a really cool picture of the lagoon nebula. 

When our class started talking about astro-photography, I thought we (my group - we were all rookies) might catch a faint  nebula - it would not look like the coolest picture on google. It was my first time, I've never operated a telescope nor knew how it worked so my standard was low - I thought I would just be happy if I caught anything like a bunch of concentrated stars with a weak gas cloud or something. Like the one below. Luckily this is how it looked like when we were trying to focus/align the telescope :). 

I stayed up for most of the setup (8-11 ish) and I decided to go back into my cozy sleeping bag and get some rest before we went out for our turn (at 3:30 am) so that we could be proactive and not just a bunch of dead high schoolers. The thing was that I couldn't sleep. I just closed my eyes and told my self that I should sleep but I just couldn't. My group got up at 2:00 am so that we could somewhat learn what we were doing. 

I learned how to align/find an object in the sky, how to align it on a camera and most importantly how to focus on an object. We got really good clarity and did a good job centering it on the frame. After all that hard work, my group took turns taking about 107 pictures (you have to take a picture of the same object, in the relatively same position). By the time we finished we could see the sky brighten up, although we couldn't see the sun. 

After that, when we came back to school, the photo had to be processed, so I put into this program called Deep Sky Stacker, I had no idea what was happening - I just clicked all the options that seemed logical to me and this is what I got after waiting for like an hour or two.

I was really, really mad! Luckily, before I harmed my computer, my teacher told me to open it up in Photoshop and after messing around with all the different options, (drum roll please) I ended up with the below picture. 

In conclusion, this trip was amazing, I've learned a lot and got new insight into the astrophotography world. I really want to do this again, but this time I would have somewhat of an idea of what I was doing before I dive into it. Also, there a few other nebulea that I want to capture. I challenge you all to find a cooler photo of the lagoon nebula than this one on Google!