First Milkyway shot that I'm genuinely proud of!

[Jayla]

Hi all,

Set my alarm for 3am in the wee hours of Saturday morning, drove 20km out to my fave dark site, and snapped this.

f/2.8, ISO4000, 15 seconds. On a Nikon D5100 and 24mm lens. Tweaked in LightRoom to lighten some of the detail.

Really chuffed with this, checked stellarium to determine when the core of the MW would be high enough from the horizon. Lots of creatures come out at night here, making all sorts of strange noises, so I ended up tethering the camera out of the car window! (you may laugh, but when you shine the torch and see eyes reflecting at you from multiple angles its freaky!)

I'm planning to go try again this weekend, theres a church at the dark site, so I want to try and capture that in the foreground. Can anyone suggest some improvements for my shot? Is ISO4000 too high? If I'm shooting with something in the foreground, I'm guessing I need 2 separate shots stacked with diff settings, any tips?

Thanls

[graemlourens]

Hey Jayla

Thx for sharing, beautiful picture! 

Stacking will make a huge difference. But not only 2, make around 30! (thats only investing little more than 7 minutes )

Stacking you can easily do with DSS (Deepskystacker) playing around with the sliders a little. 

There will be more than enough people here including me to help you with your first stacking when you've got the pics

[graemlourens]

Btw: when you're stacking you could maybe even try and go higher with iso, but lower exposure time to maybe 10 seconds so star trailing would become less (even if i'm surprised, at 24mm you shouldn't have trailing at 15 sec (rule 500?)

The additional noise the stacking will remove very efficiently.

[Steve-O]

looks amazing, I could look at photos like that all day

[happy-kat]

That's very nice.

If you are going to stack then you could do some darks and/or bias frames as well.

I tend to hedge my bets and do both lol.

Though if you include the foreground I think unless you cut bits out you won't be able to stack as the stars are moving so you get really blurred foreground when compiled, perhaps there is a way round that.

[robbie c]

That's a lovely image one you can be very proud of well done  

[KevUU]

That's really nice already, nevermind the improvements

[hjw]

Hi all,

... Lots of creatures come out at night here, making all sorts of strange noises, so I ended up tethering the camera out of the car window! (you may laugh, but when you shine the torch and see eyes reflecting at you from multiple angles its freaky!)

I'm planning to go try again this weekend, theres a church at the dark site, so I want to try and capture that in the foreground. Can anyone suggest some improvements for my shot? Is ISO4000 too high? If I'm shooting with something in the foreground, I'm guessing I need 2 separate shots stacked with diff settings, any tips?

Thanls

Nice shot! By the way, your creatures are called possums. I've got them around my place too. Noisy little buggers !