Night Sky over Anglesey

[Gerr]

The clouds parted for a couple of hours over the past couple of days which allowed me to get out and about with my star tracker and astro modded Canon 6D with a 50mm Sigma Art lens attached to it.

I wandered over the  headland on the northwest side of Holy Island which is the small landmass on top of  Anglesey. 

This headland is called the Range and looks towards South Stack Lighthouse and The Llyn Peninsula. Looking west over the Irish Sea is nice and dark till you see the city glow of Dublin in Ireland!

My sky shots were tracked and stacked (at least eight for each panel - six panels in total) using ISO1600 f2.8 and 40secs exposure time. The foreground shots were taken last when the moon had come up (giving me more light) and these were at ISO800 f4 and 30secs.

The Selfie shot was done at ISO2000 f1.7 and 10secs.  I also used a hydrogen alpha filter to bring out the nebula in Orion (5 images tracked and stacked at ISO3200 f1.8 240secs).

I also took calibration films; Darks (10), Flats (12) and Bias (20).

The images were stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and then processed in Lightroom and Photoshop CS (Photomerge here was better then PTGui). There was some haze and light cloud about which I didn't notice till processing and this gave me some difficulty with gradients and colour casts in the image composites. HDR toning did help with this on the Orion shots.

It was just nice to see some stars and constellations which is such a rarity of late!!

Anyway the Images!! CC's welcome.

Image 1: South Stack Lighthouse and Ellen's Tower from the Range with the North America nebula and Milky way making a guest appearance!

 

Image 2: The Llyn Peninsula and Orion from the Range.

 

Image 3:  Rhoscolyn beacon (the Llyn), Orion and Myself as the 'Guest appearance'

 

[Swoop1]

Beautiful images @Gerr

I loved my trip to Anglesey last year. Gorgeous location.

[FenlandPaul]

These are fantastic, Ger. My favourite is the selfie, for the human element, but each is great. The processing on the Cygnus MW is lovely.

Interesting that PS did something better than PTGui! So far for me it’s been the other way round (although sadly neither can help correct a missed area of sky in a mosaic!!).

Paul

[Gerr]

12 minutes ago, FenlandPaul said:

These are fantastic, Ger. My favourite is the selfie, for the human element, but each is great. The processing on the Cygnus MW is lovely.

Interesting that PS did something better than PTGui! So far for me it’s been the other way round (although sadly neither can help correct a missed area of sky in a mosaic!!).

Paul

Thanks Paul, processing is always difficult and having recently  found my monitor is brighter than others I've had to 'guess brightness and contrast' a bit!! Gave me quite a headache trying to get prints looking right!! I was also surprised that photoshops 'photomerge' was superior in blending the images together.  PTGui  gave horrible gradients - maybe does not like light polluted and hazy cloud images.

Looking forward to watching your video later - I haven't seen much aurora around here of late!!

Geraint.

[skyhog]

Stunning 

[clarkpm4242]

Great set of images @Gerr !  Thanks for the technical info, my astro modded DSLR arrived two days ago  Paul

[FenlandPaul]

Just now, clarkpm4242 said:

my astro modded DSLR arrived two days ago  Paul

Super excited to see the images from that, Paul!  (Sorry to hijack your thread @Gerr)