Blackbrazen

I hadn't thought of doing that, but I will now! It's a bit noisy now that I look at it again, but I was quite happy with the result given the level of LP on the outskirts of the town.

Hi all, I've been trying to learn how to take better photos of the Milky Way, and this is my latest attempt. A late August view of the Milky Way over the War Memorial outside Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire.

Exactly. So long as someone is showing interest, it's good news! Nice choice of landing site too!

Gorgeous! Powis skies are fantastic, eh? What kind of mount did you use?

Does anyone know how the Baader Neo compares to the Antares ALP filter? I picked an Antares up for £19 and it seems quite good...

You're absolutely right, with a LP filter and an Astrotracker/Polarie or something like that, it would be much better. Gotta work on that! This isn't Japan though. It's Stonehaven War Memorial south of Aberdeen taken when I was home at New Year.

Thanks! I used a Canon 50D with 17-55 IS USM. Background frame was a single 25 second exposure at 6400 ISO stacked in DSS with darks and bias frames. The foreground was cropped from a similar frame at 1600 ISO. All of this is still very much trial and error though!

Still working on photos I took at New Year...and learning a lot as I muddle my way through! The LP from the town was pretty awful, but I'm quite happy with the amount of detail that I managed to tease out. The memorial itself was horribly affected by the processing, so I layered in an image of it from another frame captured at the same time. All feedback gratefully received and thanks for looking!

Gorgeous! Can I ask what ISO and shutter speed you used?

That's a great shot. Have you seen this guy's video? Very interesting...

I'm just a beginner like you, so it's basically just a lot of trial and error! Yes, it was just a single exposure, but I stacked it with about 15 dark frames and then experimented with some of the tweaks I found in the Sky at Night Guide to Astrophotography to get the star colours and the luminosity in the Milky Way. Lots of work with curves and a bit of unsharp mask too. It's been my bible since the summer, and it's just absolutely fabulous! So easy to read.

Reprocessing of the above image.

Yes, it was certainly very good seeing. I took this looking SW, to avoid most of the LP leaching over from the town. Excellent dark skies looking eastwards over the sea too.

My first attempt at a seriuous widefield was this shot of the Milky Way over the War Memorial in Stonehaven. No darks or bias frames used for this, although I think it might have helped... I have reduced the file size in order to attach it. Canon 50D 17-55 lens ISO-6400 f4.0 30Sec

Yes, Looking at it again, it's clearly very uniform along its length and not tapered in any way. Nevermind, I'm quite pleased with it, and looking forward to what I can get from more frames and a variety of exposures. I also need to take darks and bias frames too. Rizzi, I just bunged the two frames that I took into DSS, checked them and hit Go. Then I took the resulting tiff file and worked on curves, sharpness and saturation in Photoshop.