The Milky Way over the William Herschel Telescope

[petershah]

Snapped this shot while over visiting The island of La Palma.
Two panel mosaic, exposure time was 3x 20s with darks and flats for each panel. Iso 51000, Sony A7s, Nikon 2.8 50mm @5.6

Below a link to a small video of my son taking a look around the Isaac Newton Telescope from the same visit

https://youtu.be/AGRNarJEdhg

Click the link for the big version http://astropix.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/William-Herschel-Milky-Way-small-4.jpg

[GOTO]

Wow that's awesome. I love it.
Geoff

[Ryderscope]

That is one big and bold image. Nice :thumbsup:

[petershah]

Thank you for the feedback...I have to say though I dont use this camera for night scapes normally.. Its a bit of a beast. It surprised me how much I could get on a fixed tripod with virtually no trailing.

[gregbradley]

Terrific framing. Very impactful image.

A bit of data for you.

The Sony A7s as you may know suffers from the star eater noise filter on RAWs.

Under 30 seconds I think it doesn't but I am not sure of that as the firmware updates along the way made the point where this filter kicked in sooner and sooner. The later firmwares have it kick in at 4.0 second exposures and longer.

I see some green stars. This is also a sign of the star eater.

The solution is to use Continuous Hi or Continuous Lo drive mode. This disables the filtering up to 30 second exposures.

So either there is no star eater in this image or you may've gotten even more stars and no green stars if you used the above.

Josh on this forum uses an A7s and could tell you more.

Greg.

[RickS]

Great image, Peter!

[petershah]

Thanks for the feed back.

Thanks for the info. Yes I knew about the issue but wasnt aware that the continuous modes disabled it.......I would have probably got more stars then as it wasn't on continuous mode. Ill do some testing on this.