A brief astro landscape imaging session at Booley

[mcrowle]

The forecast was very promising for Friday night, but with only 40 minutes between the onset of astro-dark and Moonrise I opted to head to a local coastal spot for a brief session imaging the Milky Way over St Austell Bay.

Though I also took along a star tracker and astro-modified EOS 600D, given the limited time I actually only used an off-the-shelf EOS 5D Mk III on a static tripod. Still, via 4 lenses from 14mm to 50mm, I came away with 17 different compositions.

Here are a few results. The frames were stacked in Sequator and post-processed (for curves, colour balance, vignetting, gradients and noise reduction) in CyberLink PhotoDirector. First up, my least favourite of the 4 to be honest: the Milky Way via 6 x 30 second frames with a Samyang 14mm at F/5.6 and ISO 12800.

Regards, Mike

Edited September 19, 2022 by mcrowle

[mcrowle]

Next, 5 x 15-second exposures with a Samyang 24mm at f/2 and ISO 6400: 

Edited September 18, 2022 by mcrowle

[mcrowle]

Next, 5 x 10-second exposures with a Leica Summicron 50mm at f/2 and ISO 6400: 

[mcrowle]

Finally, Jupiter rising over Polkerris, 5 x 15-second exposures with a Samyang 24mm at f/2 and ISO 6400:

[FenlandPaul]

I love these, Mike. Especially the smoothed sea from the long exposure. Very naturally processed too. 👍

[dark knight]

I actually really like that first one Mike, so nice to have those rocks in the foreground,  great framing.

[mcrowle]

1 hour ago, dark knight said:

I actually really like that first one Mike, so nice to have those rocks in the foreground,  great framing.

Thanks, Carl.

I think I was less happy with the first image because of the extra adjustments and compromises I'd made. It was the first time I'd used the 14mm on the full frame camera. I had to close the aperture down to f/5.6, to reduce vignetting, and to increase the ISO further than I'd like - so that meant extra noise reduction in post processing. Even with the aperture shut down, the distortion was awful and I lost most of the foreground interest while correcting it! 🤣 Still, I suppose it's not tooooooo bad.

Edited October 7, 2022 by mcrowle