FenlandPaul

Great stuff. 👍 Everyone’s first MW image is special and that’s no exception! You wouldn’t regret a Star Adventurer!

Love that, Paul - as always!! I like the light painting from inside the windows - very nice touch. How do you find the mk2? The articulated screen sounds like a big plus, but how do you find the performance generally?

I'd had this shot in mind for some time, conscious that it's a bit of a cliche in Cornish nightscape circles! We were in Cornwall in quite a challenging period astronomically, with the first week marred by cloud and the second week hindered by the moon. So I ended up having to shoot this quite early on the evening before true darkness had begun and while the full moon was still in the murk on the horizon. It also needed favourable tides - so a lot to come together. I'll definitely be revisiting it again on future visits, but reasonably happy for a first attempt.. Enjoy! Comments and suggestions welcome as ever. ✨📷 Shot with a Canon 6D and Samyang 24mm lens.

Absolute belter!! 👌

My final entry to this. A more detailed shot of the Milky Way from Aquila to Cepheus on the night of the maximum, with a single Perseid narrowly missing the Elephants Trunk nebula region. This was shot with a modified Canon EOS 450D and a 16mm Samyang F/2 lens from Cambridgeshire, UK.

Fantastic shots. What an enjoyable first light! I’m guessing you’re happy with it?

Hey there, I’m by no means an expert but I do use the same lens a lot and I love it. It looks to me like your focus is sound (certainly the stars don’t seem overly large), but it seems you might have some coma towards the edges - nothing horrendous but certainly detectable. I don’t know why the focus mark is so off - mine is bang on infinity. Is there a reason you shot at f/4? It should, of course, sharpen things up a bit. I’d be interested to see what the same image looks like at f/2.8. I know that Samyangs can have patchy quality. I’ve not heard too much wrong with the 14mm, though, so if you’re not happy it might be worth contacting the dealer from whom you bought it. 😊

This week's "Sturgeon" Moon, rising over the first and last church in England, at Sennen in Cornwall. Separate exposures for the foreground and the moon, blended in PS. I wish I had a longer lens than 200mm!! 🌕📷

Lovely shot Pete. 👍

That’s a lovely shot - great capture! But I think it must be a different meteor to the one I caught as it’s in (almost) the opposite direction to the one above, which wouldn’t make sense from your Norfolk location. Great pic, though - you can really see the green colour!

And my second entry, this time taken with a Canon 1000D and a Samyang 14mm f/2.8 lens over Swavesey Lake in Cambridgeshire, also on the night of the maximum. I saw this visually as well and it was a corker!!

Some stunning images on here this year - glad a lot of people managed to bag some! Here’s my first, taken on the night of the maximum over Ferry Lagoon, in the Fen Drayton Lakes RSPB reserve in Cambridgeshire. 13 second exposures (32 stacked here), taken on a Canon 6D with Samyang 24mm lens at f/2.8 and ISO 3200. Stacked in Sequator (using the shot with the meteor as the reference frame), edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Great image. You must be stoked having that as both your first MW and meteor image! The Samyang 14mm is a cracking lens, isn’t it?

The clarity up there must have been incredible! I was fortunate enough to get to 17,500 feet once, and I felt like I could reach out and prize the stars out of the sky!! Which would have provided good distraction as I couldn’t sleep at that altitude!

That’s terrific, Paul. There’s something about light painted old machinery that works very well with the Milky Way!

Glad you got some before cloud took over. What a good idea to pause on the frames with meteors - I’d never thought of that. Particular effective at 25fps when all the meteors get lost!

Absolute belter! 🤩

A nice, bright colourful one! 👍

In the bag! Well caught. 👍

Thanks Russ. I’d hoped for a nice reflection in the water but it was very breezy so no joy - next time maybe!!

Things were very slow initially and I felt the same (especially as I’d not brought a comfy chair with me so was getting neck ache!). Glad I stuck with it - tiredness today was worth it. ☺️ Even during a big shower the hit rate is quite slim. I took around 1700 images in total from 3 cameras, and from that haul there are just 3 photogenic meteors (25 in total, most very faint).

Fantastic - look forward to seeing that!

Thankyou! That's sounds plausible given you're over in the West, but I don't pretend to be a triangulation expert! It was caught in Oxfordshire as well here, and in that image it's a little to the left of the centre line of the Milky Way. So from where you are it may well have been between Jupiter and Saturn!

I had 3 cameras whirring away last night. As is so often the case, a lot of the best meteors I saw fell just out of frame or between exposures! Of the 1700 images I waded through this morning, this stunner at 00:55 on the night of 12/13 August was my favourite, from the edge of the Cambridgeshire Fens. To remove some of the noise from the sky, I stacked 32 13 second exposures, taken on a Canon 6D with Samyang 24mm lens at f/2.8 and ISO 3200. Stacked in Sequator, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop. Enjoy! ✨📷

That’s a cracker! Perfectly balanced with the stone.