Northern Milky Way nightscape from Mauna Kea

[Retrograde]

Grabbed this from the Mauna Kea visitors station during my Hawaii trip back in Late/Jan early Feb. It was pretty rushed as I only had 20 minutes to assemble tripod, camera and lens, find a location out the back of the carpark with a view of the northern Milky Way and then pack up and get back on the bus before it departed back down to Hilo.

The red on the tree branches is from the red-light torches of local astronomers who run sky tours for visitors there. You can see Andromeda Galaxy on the left of frame and Capella is the bright star at top of frame/middle right.

Pentax K-5, Samyang 14mm f2.8, 20 seconds at ISO 2500

[OzEclipse]

Pete.
Nice work
Joe

[RickS]

Very atmospheric, Pete!

[DavidTrap]

Nice.

Fantastic trip to the summit - a definite highlight of my trip to Hawaii

DT

[N1]

Great shot.
Double Cluster centre left :astron:

[Retrograde]

Thanks Joe!



Thank you Rick. :)



Cheers David. It's a special place and somewhere I've wanted to visit for a long time.



Thanks Mirko & appreciate you pointing out the double cluster. My knowledge of the northern sky isn't great I'm afraid. Whilst I've travelled to the northern hemisphere on a few occasions I've never really gotten the chance to get out under a clear dark sky before.

[cazza132]

Nicely framed with the red illuminated branches, the Milky Way (a difficult part of the Milky Way to pick up) and Andromeda sneaking in there.

How does the Pentax go for astro? I've heard it has a sky tracking feature.

[zardos123]

nice pete, and yep the pentax does very well at astro, the sensor shift works quite well, the k5 and k1 have sensor,s from the same family as the nikon d800a, noise is identical on both cameras in fact if pixel shift is employed the pentax comes up trumps (not donald)

[Retrograde]

Thanks Troy - pretty happy with Pentax so far.
I have a K-5 and about a year ago acquired a K-5iis which I got modded. To use the sky-tracking feature on the K-5/K-5iis I would need to buy a GPS attachment but I believe it works pretty well for wide-angle and would probably be good for shooting nightscapes. Brad (zardos123) has the full-frame K-1 which has the sky-tracking feature built in.