Milkyway from near Galloway National Park

[Kbramley]

Well its been a long time since I managed to do any astro mainly sue to the birth of my Son and a house renovation, however we went on our first family holiday this week to Dumfries (near Galloway National Park - uks best dark sky site), and amazingly we had two clear nights. The view was incredible, I have never seen the night sky from such a dark location, there were so many stars it was hard to make some of the fainter regular constellations out as they we swamped by so many other stars. The Milky way was clearly visible as a long grey streak running direcly overhead, right down to the horizon, with the darker dust bands clearly visible. A quick peak through some 15x70 bins was incredible, I spent a good while just panning around looking at various nebula and globular clusters. I had with me my trusty 450D (modded) and my old motorised gem mount which I powered via a portable jump started kit, this enabled me to take some long exposures throug my new Canon 50mm Prime lens. I experimented with various settings and exposures and took a variety of pics. One exposure I accidently left on for 20 mins (my son woke up crying so had to go and nurse him back to sleep), this turned out to be the pick of the night , see below, also is a nice pic of the southern horizon with various nebula clearly present. Still got more to process but these are my favourites so far. Enjoy

Keith

F2.2, ISO400, 20mins single exposure

F1.8 ISO400, 2 mins single exposure

[Kbramley]

Heres another one hot off the processing press. This was much harder to process, I think the focus had slipped a little and a bit of dew may of started to form (It was pointing almost straight up). I spotted NGC7000 peeping into one of my shots so I decided to try and get few shots to stack with it more in the frame.

6x3mins stacked

F2

ISO 1600

[mapstar]

Lovely shots and well done. I cant wait to get up there for the star party and take in the clear skies