IISAC Milky Way Rising

[AstroJason]

Hi all,

Another image I have been working on since IISAC. This is a 2 image composite of the Milky Way rising over the trees at Lostock. I have always wanted to do a tracked long exposure with a nice sharp foreground and these 2 exposures enabled me to do that.

Milkyway is a single 2 minute exposure shot with the Canon 6D and Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/3.5 ISO3200 tracked using the NEQ6Pro mount.

The foreground is a 30 second untracked exposure.

High Res shot here. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/59004995@N04/14015216440/)

Higher Res shot here. (https://www.flickr.com/photos/59004995@N04/14015216440/sizes/o/)

Adding the two images together eliminates having the trees blurred due to tracking and as well as ensuring pinpoint stars during the 2 minute exposure.

Feedback much appreciated!

Thanks,

Jason

[Joshua Bunn]

Lovely framing and resolution Jason for a widefield shot.

[Rod771]

Great result Jason :thumbsup:

[AstroJason]

Thanks for the kind words guys.

I figured I should try a panorama as I had imaged the Antares region as well. The only issue is that photoshop struggles with panos of stars so I usually don't bother with it any more but this one seemed to work ok.

Higher Res here (https://www.flickr.com/photos/59004995@N04/14201834442/sizes/h/)

[blink138]

work ok?! it is great............... jason how do you add them together without blur?
pat

[strongmanmike]

Pretty speccy image that :thumbsup: Seeing shots like this I always think how good it would be if we had better cones in our retina and perhaps slightly larger lens and pupils when dark adapted say 12 -15mm when dilated...views like this would be pretty incredible to see for ourselves when we looked up from a dark sky huh?

Mike

[killswitch]

Looks great Jase, I like the aggressive dust lanes

[iceman]

Really nice Jase, lovely processing. (not to everyone's taste though of course :))

[AstroJason]

Pat, yeah I've usually had issues with PS trying to stitch images together but this one seemed ok. I only say ok because there is a section around the cat paw nebula that seemed to not blend correctly. To create the pano I used the "Photomerge" feature in PS which is under the File Menu. But yeah it only usually works really well on landscapes and not stars. I guess there was enough nebulosity in the images for it to work this time.

Yeah Mike, I know right, how amazing would the night sky look if we could see it as detailed as this?! We would probably take it for granted though?!

Thanks Ed and Mike, I seem to cut out the atmosphere with my curves processing. I might try it again with a less aggressive approach. I need to invest in a good monitor as off my laptop its easy to over do it. When I look at these images on my phone (samsung galaxy S2) they look over saturated.