Star trails over Queenstown NZ

[AstroJason (Jason)]

Very rainy day in Sydney today so what better way to spend a day like this than to go through holiday photos?!

Here is another shot from my NZ trip. Took this on our first nights stay there from the hotel balcony. It is a single 10 minute exposure of the Milky Way rising above the Remarkables. I was surprised at how dark the skies were in Queenstown, really didn't think the MW would be visible so easily from there.

Probably not everyone's cup of tea with the supersaturated colours but I wanted to give this one a bit of punch.

Higher res here.

Love NZ, can't wait to go back.

Cheers

[Cimitar (Evan)]

NZ is great! I'm a huge fan of the South Island.

Queenstown and The Remarkables provide a nice reference point in your image and I like the colour saturation, brings your image to life

Out of curiosity - were you aiming for the rotation of the Milky Way or was that a result of your 10min exposure? If it's the latter, perhaps try a higher ISO and take shorter exposures (circa 30sec) and stack roughly 10 of them together to reduce the noise. Then you can crank up the light curve to bring out the faint stuff and minimise field rotation.

Cheers, Evan

[AstroJason (Jason)]

Cheers Evan, it was my first trip to NZ and I loved it. Can't wait to go back it is an amazing place. The people, the food, the scenery. Can't be beat.

To be honest this was just an experiment to see what a 10 minute exposure would look like on the Canon 6D. Never taken an exposure over 5 minutes with it in the past.

Actually, right after this exposure finished I decided to go back to 30 second exposures at ISO3200 so I could do another star trail image using the stacking technique but also use the images to do a mini time lapse as well. Just got to get around to doing processing them now.