Milky Way

[TheoP]

Taken with Canon 600D with Tokina 11-16mm lens. I used a home made tracker to get a two minute exposure.

http://500px.com/photo/37085814
http://starsinphotos.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/milky-way-again/ (http://starsinphotos.wordpress.com/)
http://theo16dob.blogspot.com.au/

[Forgey]

Beautiful Theo, well done :)

[ourkind]

Excellent well done!

[iceman]

Nicely processed!

[Larryp]

Very nice, Theo

[adavis]

That is extremely well processed, nice shot!

[matt34]

Nice Work Theo, care to share about the homemade tracker, pics how you made it etc?

[IanP]

Nice shot, Theo ...
I saw a photo of your tracker - very impressive device.
How do you adjust/set the tracking speed?

[adavis]

Yeah OK, we are going to need details on your tracker now :lol:

[gregbradley]

That's nicely done and great processing with very good contrast and colour. Only pick is you may want to stop it down to F4 as there's a bit of coma still in the corners at F3.2. Its all trial and error. I like the 60 seconds. Perhaps try 90 seconds and F4. Stars are nice and round for 60 seconds so your tracker is working well.

Greg.

[Irish stargazer]

lovely shot.:thumbsup:

[Craige]

Nice work!

[Ross G]

A good photo Theo.

Nice colours.

Ross.

[TheoP]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your comments and suggestions.

Greg, I tried the Tokina first at F2.8 but the coma was quite bad. On such a wide field of view its not too bad, especially if you crop some of the edges out. I will try F4 and see how it goes.

This image was a 120 seconds exposure. I have managed 4 minutes without a problem and still got round stars. I didnt use those images because the bright stars started to burn out on the 600Ds sensor. You can see some of that starting to happen on the 120 second image. I need some advice on how to avoid that from happening.

Matt, Ian, Andrew; All the details of my tracker is on another blog. See the detail at: http://theo16dob.blogspot.com.au/

When I built the tracker I was less than impressed about its performance but I recently got myself a green laser and use it now to do very accurate polar alignment. Its incredibly easy and spot on every time. Bad polar alignment was my biggest problem all along.

[TheoP]

I have managed to look at my original 4 minute exposure again and played around a bit to clean it up with PS CS2 and LR4.

I decided not to worry about the stars that are overexposed. They add a bit of drama to the image. A larger version is available at: http://500px.com/photo/37639600 (http://http://500px.com/photo/37639600)