Leyburn Milkyway

[DavidTrap]

Here's a pano from last night at Leyburn. The seeing was shocking - lots of moisture and the skyglow was horrible.

42 individual frames, D800, 3200ISO, 20sec, f4, 50mm lens. Stitched in PS (spherical projection was the most natural looking).

Lots of gradients to deal with - but that's for another night.

DT

[RickS]

The seeing certainly made the brighter stars stand out, David. All my subs have great big halos around the stars too.

Looking forward to your final version...

Cheers,
Rick.

[allan gould]

That's a great panorama David. I don't have the patience or skills for such a dedicated image.

[midnight]

Very promising David. Looking forward too for the final image. The presentation method gives it some symmetry from the sky to the landscape which makes it interesting.

Darrin...

[naskies]

Nicely done. It's going to be a cracker of an image once you've had the chance to process it.

Here's a staged action shot of DT's panorama.

[gregbradley]

Great shot David.

I've read in numerous posts about the D800's incredible dynamic range.

I downloaded your image and had a play with it and I am surprised at the amount of data that is in this image. Certainly more than "normal".

I can send you the copy of the result of that.

I usually find full frame projection the best. It is an option in PTGui Pro.

Not sure of PS offers that. Otherwise cylindrical sometimes is quite similar.

42 panels, wow, how did you keep track of all them? It'd be easy to get lost in post processing.
How much do you overlap your images? Did you start at ground level and work your way up?

Why not the 14-24?

Greg.

[RobF]

Great effort David, and certainly must have been a lot of work to collect and process. I'd be interested to here more about your workflow too actually.

Would have been great to escape to Leyburn for some clear skies....

[DavidTrap]

Thanks for the comments gents - unfortunately the sky was far from clear. I hope to repeat this as the nights get colder and drier.

I chose the 50mm lens for several reasons including less distortion at the edges of the frames. I basically worked along the horizon and shot a pano as I normally do using a 50%overlap, then swung back to the start, moved the camera up a bit and snapped another row. I repeated this for 4 rows. There was a lot of overlap in an attempt to avoid missing a bit of sky. I'm sure it could have been completed in 20 frames, rather than 42. 20-30mins to take the images.

Processing involved clicking on Photomerge in PS, selecting all the files and hitting go. I was amazed when the completed image was spat out. I fiddled with the setting and settled on this.

Agreed, it needs a lot more processing, but I'm not sure it's worth spending too much time on as you can't make chicken salad out of chicken sh...

I'll try a gradient removal in PixInsight on Wednesday. Unfortunately work interfered with processing today - haven't even touched the CCD data, other than to backup the laptop!

DT

[alexch]

Nice result, David.

How do you find D800 for astro work - are the extra pixels doing anything at night? And how is the amp glow at higher ISO and longer exposures?

Cheers,
Alex