Saturday night Milky Way

[StephenM (Stephen)]

Hi all,

Here's last night's Milky Way from about 85km south-west of Brisbane. I've decided to try and master Milky Way panoramas, and this is my second attempt. It's a total of 58 x 30 sec exposures (probably too many!!!) taken with the 50D and Tokina 11-16mm at 11mm and f/2.8.

Still room for improvement, but I'm happy enough with this as a second attempt. Higher res version on Flickr if you're interested.

Thanks for looking!

Cheers,
Stephen

[iceman (Mike)]

58! Wow that's a lot Problem of the crop sensor I suppose

Nice result!

[lacad01 (Adam)]

Nice work Stephen, that looks pretty darn good

[CapturingTheNight (Greg)]

Great result Stephen. You have handled the inevitable distortion to the top of the frame well. It is harder to do Milkyway bow images when the central bulge is rising in the east as the area around crux is so high in the sky. Much easier when the bulge is about 45 degrees above the horizon in the west. I always say it is better to have lots of overlap than not enough but 58 images is probably a little extreme But hey, if your computer and stitching program can handle it then there is nothing wrong with it at all. By using so many images you are negating any illumination or coma issues towards the edges of the frames by using only the very middle of the images. At 11mm on your x1.6 crop camera you are getting a horizontal field of view of about 91 degrees and vertical of about 69 degrees, so based on this images field of view I would probably do about 16 images (2 rows of 8). Double that if you want to be ultra safe. Any more is probably not worth the effort. You are not gaining any more resolution unless you go for a bigger focal length lens like a 24, 35 or 50mm. You might need 50+ images then. I recently helped a friend stitch together a pano he had done at 50mm focal length that contained nearly 100 images. My computer hated me that day.

[Astro_Bot]

Nice one.

[StephenM (Stephen)]

Originally Posted by iceman

58! Wow that's a lot Problem of the crop sensor I suppose

Nice result!

Thanks Mike... the 6D is high on my wish list!

Originally Posted by lacad01

Nice work Stephen, that looks pretty darn good

Thanks Adam! Next time I need to find a better foreground, but that's difficult in the dark.

Originally Posted by CapturingTheNight

Great result Stephen. You have handled the inevitable distortion to the top of the frame well. It is harder to do Milkyway bow images when the central bulge is rising in the east as the area around crux is so high in the sky. Much easier when the bulge is about 45 degrees above the horizon in the west. I always say it is better to have lots of overlap than not enough but 58 images is probably a little extreme But hey, if your computer and stitching program can handle it then there is nothing wrong with it at all. By using so many images you are negating any illumination or coma issues towards the edges of the frames by using only the very middle of the images. At 11mm on your x1.6 crop camera you are getting a horizontal field of view of about 91 degrees and vertical of about 69 degrees, so based on this images field of view I would probably do about 16 images (2 rows of 8). Double that if you want to be ultra safe. Any more is probably not worth the effort. You are not gaining any more resolution unless you go for a bigger focal length lens like a 24, 35 or 50mm. You might need 50+ images then. I recently helped a friend stitch together a pano he had done at 50mm focal length that contained nearly 100 images. My computer hated me that day.

Thanks for the info, Greg! I'm using Microsoft ICE to stitch the pano (with full size JPGs exported from Lightroom), and it seemed to handle the large number of images with ease. Having so many images, I was able to crop the assembled pano fairly tightly, which allowed me to avoid the worst of the distortion at the top. Next time I'll try cutting down the number of images...

Originally Posted by Astro_Bot

Nice one.

Thanks for commenting!

Cheers,
Stephen

[gregbradley]

Lovely. The large number of shots has paid a nice dividend though with great clarity and detail.

I took the same pano with both a full frame 36mp camera and an APSc 16mp camera and used the same lens and settings.
I'll be posting that soon as an interest in the difference between full frame and APSc (Canon is APSh). Its probably less than you think with the right APSc chip. But full frame gets more photons from the same scene so its always going to be ahead to some degree.

Greg.

[StephenM (Stephen)]

Originally Posted by gregbradley

Lovely. The large number of shots has paid a nice dividend though with great clarity and detail.

I took the same pano with both a full frame 36mp camera and an APSc 16mp camera and used the same lens and settings.
I'll be posting that soon as an interest in the difference between full frame and APSc (Canon is APSh). Its probably less than you think with the right APSc chip. But full frame gets more photons from the same scene so its always going to be ahead to some degree.

Greg.

Thanks very much Greg! I'll be interested to see your full frame vs APSc comparison.

Cheers,
Stephen