IISAC Milky Way Rising

[AstroJason (Jason)]

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.

Higher Res shot here.

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 (Joshua)]

Lovely framing and resolution Jason for a widefield shot.

[Rod771 (Rod)]

Great result Jason

[AstroJason (Jason)]

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

[blink138 (Pat)]

Originally Posted by 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

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

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Pretty speccy image that 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 (Edison)]

Looks great Jase, I like the aggressive dust lanes

[iceman (Mike)]

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

[AstroJason (Jason)]

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.