Milky Way revisited

[robindurant]

I have imaged he Mlky Way from light polluted Brighton with my Astrotrac using 5 minute subs and got a reasonable final image. Last night I thought that I would put the Astrotrac to the test imaging at 10 minute exposures. Here is the result, just 5 frames and one dark. I think the Astrotrac is one of the best things to come on the Atro market for years

[bigbox]

That's a fantastic photo, well done... I myself are just getting into widefield photos just using the camera & tripod, but i think im soon going to be piggy backing the camera to the top of my scope so im able to track stuff...

[JamesF]

Very nice Summer Triangle image. Be interesting to see what difference more lights might make, but at ten minutes a frame you'd be up all night

I'd be tempted to try cropping off the edges where you have some stacking artefacts and seeing if that allows you to move the black point up a bit?

James

[Hoshikomi]

Excellent image!! What lens did you use?

[robindurant]

17mm - iso 1600

[Hanuman]

Wow. That is incredible. You have inspired me, if that's what you're doing from a light polluted location.

Something I don't understand though, although I'm new to imaging and haven't done the research to understand stacking yet- are those five minute exposures at ISO 1600? I guess you need that length of exposure to capture those fainter stars, but don't you end up with a massively washed out and orange sky background? I guess that's where the processing comes in, to reset what should be black, back to black?

I took a bunch of 30 sec exposures of Summer Triangle at ISO400 the other night while meteor watching and was surprised at how much detail I could pull back out of it after by tweaking levels and removing some of the colour cast but that was only going from mag 4 stars in the original to mag 7 after tweaking.

I'm going to post them for comment anyway.

[robindurant]

This image was 10 minute subs. I use a Neodymium Filtermsono orange. My initial images are loaded with stars so I process most out to give prominence to the subject

[laser_jock99]

Great picture, the acuracy of the Astrotrac has always impressed me.

Did you say you used a Neodymium filter for the image as these tend to add a purple cast to the picture?

I had a quick go at making the colour more 'neutral' looking in Paint Shop Pro, mainly by resetting the colour balance to 6500K and a quick histogram shift. Hope you don't mind?

[luis]

Cool tonality !