Airglow near Parkes Radio Telescope Saturday May 12

[OzEclipse]

This was taken last Saturday night, May 12. Travelling with a friend this past week, we mostly recorded sodium (yellow) airglow. This was a 2.5 minute exposure on a fixed tripod using astro trace tracking.

Joe

[JA]

What beautiful colours :thumbsup::thumbsup:

Best
JA

[gregbradley]

That is very strong airglow. Amazing.

Greg.

[OzEclipse]

Thanks. The photo wasn't taken close to twilight either. Astronomical twilight ended at about 18:50. This picture was taken about 2 hrs after that.

It is a 2.5 min exposure which has picked up the airglow.

I have unmodded Pentax K1 and K5 bodies. My mate had a modded Canon 6D and an unmodded 5Dmkiv. The pickup by the cameras was quite different. One night the 6D would pick up strong airglow and the Pentax didn't, other nights the Pentax picked it up more than Canon.

Joe

[gregbradley]

Interesting. I once did a side by side between Sony A7r and Canon 5D3. The Sony looked better straight out of the camera as the Canon looked muddy whereas the Sony colours were good straight out of the camera plus it showed the green airglow. Canon's of course clean up in processing but I took it that the Sony had a better metering for white balance.

So it may be something to do with the white balance setting?

Greg.

[Hemi]

Lovely image! Love the colours as well but the composition is fantastic. It seems like the Milky Way is being projected out of the blue lens in the bottom corner. Very nice.

Hemi

[OzEclipse]

It could be. I didn't explain clearly in my post that it wasn't just a Canon/Pentax thing. His two Canon's, the 6D modded, 5D unmodded were also showing different results as were my two Pentaxes.

If something's red, I expect a modded camera to be different to unmodded. But were looking at yellow orange here. I would have thought there wouldn't be a great difference. I think the camera profile plays a big part especially because we are imaging a line spectrum not a continuous spectrum.

Joe