Milkyway widefield in 18mm - a draft.

[Peter77]

Hi guys!

 

As the weather has been clear. I have taken the opportunity to do some shooting

Wanted to shoot another object, but since my AVX mount didn't behave well at 300mm FL (usually tracks well but could hear some strange glitches from the drivetrain tonight), I decided to go widefield instead.

I just love shooting the Milkyway and since I had to change plans and rethink, I decided, just for the fun of it, to try with 240 seconds at 1600 iso, just to see what I would be able to pull out.

And the result is very promising. Will shoot some flats tomorrow to complete the set, but I couldn't help to try a stack tonight and some postprocessing in PS. And let me tell you guys, it didn't require much postprocessing at all, just some enhancements here and there and also did some evening out on lightpollution. Even on the TIF that Deepskystacker spat out, I could see clearly the nebulosity areas.

 

Will do another complete stack tomorrow after shooting a bunch of stacks, but just wanted to share this spectacular image. 

 

Image data:

 

Nikon D5300 unmodified

Nikkor 18-300 @ 18mm F5.6 (forgot to change to lower fr)

ISO 1600

22 lights @ 240 seconds each

15 darks

15 bias

 

And the image..

 

[Peter77]

And here is the final image including flats. Made the image a little cooler overall also.

[davew]

That's coming on a treat ! If you'd asked me if the 18 to 300 zoom was good enough to shoot the Milky Way I'd have probably said " Not really ". Shows what I know 🤔

That camera is very good at picking up the Ha isn't it ?

Do you fancy " Zooming right in " with the 35mm and see what you get or have you tried that already ?

Dave.

[Peter77]

4 hours ago, davew said:

That's coming on a treat ! If you'd asked me if the 18 to 300 zoom was good enough to shoot the Milky Way I'd have probably said " Not really ". Shows what I know 🤔

That camera is very good at picking up the Ha isn't it ?

Do you fancy " Zooming right in " with the 35mm and see what you get or have you tried that already ?

Dave.

Hi,

Generally zoomlenses doesn't really have that "oumpf" when it comes to clarity and sharpness, however this zoomlens has gotten consistently good reviews. Also I think that the higher FR contributed further to the sharpness . It is just a slight tad softer fully wide open at F3.5, so it was lucky I forgot to open the aperture fully.

 

I've tried the 35mm F1.8 fixed lens also and even though it is a fantastic lens in all aspects, Miky Way is imho not the right target for that lens. In general I like it when MW shots are very dense and 35mm tend to open it up way too much for my liking. 18mm being on the border of too high IMHO, I'd like to try some of the rokinon / tokina 14mm and 12mm, I am sure that would be a real blast

 

And yes, the camera seems to be quite sensitive to Ha even unmodified. And that's good because I like to use it as a daytime camera too

Edited September 20, 2020 by Peter77