Widefield : NLO & Lyme Regis

[John Baker]

I recently attended an open evening at the wonderful Norman Lockyer Observatory (NLO) at Sidmouth. The team gave a series of highly informative demonstration of the various telescopes, meteor detection and radio astronomy as well as their planetarium.   After a play with a big “Dob” Dobsonian telescope, the clear skies looked very promising for some decent Milky Way action.

We then headed down to Lyme Regis to see what we could do with the Cobb. Unfortunately the inner harbour was well lit up, a flashing red beacon was paying havoc, however, some good shots where had from the end on the Cobb looking to the South East.

As the night was so spectacular we came back via the NLO, on checking there was no one around, but we did stop to get some shots of the Milky Way with the domes...

A bit on the EXIF which may help. I tend to follow the 500 rule, it keeps it very simple when out on a cold night. So all images on my Canon 15mm fisheye, which 500 / 15 = 33 seconds, rounded down means I shoot at a maximum of  30" seconds. Most of the time I will shoot wide open at f2.8 - like many Canon wide lenses this one suffers from sagittal coma e.g. some of the stars at the edges appear as small triangles. Stopping down to f4 can help, but the exposure needs to be balanced with ISO. ISO I normally start shooting at ISO 6,400 to see what I get, for the Lyme Regis shots I was down to ISO 3,200, due to the ambient light. However, for the NYO it was back up to ISO 6,400 and a couple were at 12,800.

Processing - I like to have something interesting in the foreground, plus as big a sky/Milky Way as possible, so the lens is rarely level. Of course the nature of the beast is that there is normally a significant curve, I do tend to use PhotoShop Warp Tool to straighten the horizon, it does give some interesting effects on vertical walls.

I tend to use the Google nik collection - this originally was several hundred £'s, but the whole suite can be had for around £70.   For Structure/Sharpening I tend to use their Viveza tool,  this allows me to sharpen selective areas, each tool creates a new layer which can have its opacity adjusted afterwards - so the trick is to over sharpen, then tone it down with opacity. The second tool I use is the Dfine, which is their version of noise reduction software, this helps clean up the image nicely.  The other great tool in the pack is Silver Efex Pro - which I don't use for a lot of astro work but does some amazing things for normal landscapes.

I just added a last straight up shot with the fisheye, this had some huge variations in light so has was converted to B&W with SilverFX 

Comments welcome, these are only a couple of pics shot on the night - I can add some single larger examples if people are interested

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Lovely wide field shots

[laudropb]

I never tire of looking at shots of the Milky Way and your compositions are very nice. I do not image or do wide field photography myself but I appreciate all the effort and skill which goes into producing these lovely images. Once again thanks for posting

[Andy_E]

Lovely images. I particularly like the fourth one down.

[John Baker]

Lovely images. I particularly like the fourth one down.

and not a sign of Meryl Streep

[Ruud]

How beautiful.

All of them!

[Pete Presland]

Love those widefields and something interesting in the foreground always makes it a better image.

[xtreemchaos]

great set of images John,  thanks for sharing.  charl.

[damnut]

hi John,

Terrific shots, thanks for posting.  Very atmospheric.

[sammak127]

totally super.. that seems like a great place to view from

[Sleepy Kiki]

Stunning set of photos