Milky Way - 1st Anniversary

One year has passed since my first approach to the astrophotography and the night sky photographs. It was a picture of the Milky Way, a picture that I always wanted to perform and that seemed so out of reach for me back in that day. I couldn't find a better photo to remember that day that to give another try to that target and check how much my technique and abilities improved during this year.

Taking advantage of a visit to my grandparents house in the rural Galicia, I set the equipment pointing towards Sagitarius and Scorpio, the two constellations that frame the core of our galaxy  and then  I started the shoot. I must say that the Milky Way was shinning over my head as this area has very little light pollution so it was quite easy to frame. 

The cool thing about this photo is that the light dome shown at the bottom of the picture is the city of Santiago (St James) destination of the pilgrims doing the "Camino de Santiago" (Way of St. James). This path, according to the Christians, leads to the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain but, before them, the romans already knew this path towards the "End of the World", Finisterrae. They followed the Milky Way and this area was the westernmost piece of land before the atlantic ocean. Thus the way of St James is also known as "Voie lactée" – the Milky Way in French.

The shot is composed by 8 lights of 150" ISO 800, 4 darks and 4 bias (with more lights the detaild would've been better) with the Nikon D3100 and the kit lens 18-55mm f3,5-5,6 at 18mm f4 tracked with the HEQ-5 and processed with DSS, StarTools and Photoshop.

Enjoy!

The annotated image showing the main constellations in this area:

And finally, the evolution of one year:

Galactic Center

The Galactic Center is the rotational center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is located at a distance of ~27,000 ly from our Solar System and can be located between the constellations of Sagittarius, Ophiucus and Scorpius. The center of the Milky Way appears brightest due to the (suppossed) existence of a supermassive black hole, Saggitarius A*.

The image was taken with a Nikon D3100 and the kit lense without any tracking. 13 exposures of 20" to avoid trailing, 3 darks and 3 bias stacked with Deep Sky Stacker. The contrast was enhaced to make more explicit the Great Rift.

The Great Rift (sometimes called the Dark Side, Dark Rift, or, less commonly, Dark River) is a series of overlapping, non-luminous, molecular dust clouds that are located between our Solar System and the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way at an estimated distance of 300 ly. The Great Rift stretches from Cygnus to Saggitarius.
This is a clear example that there's no need of expensive equipment to enjoy the wonders of the space and to start working on astrophotography.


Enjoy!

Light Pollution

Light pollution is the alteration of light levels in the outdoor environment (from those present naturally) due to man-made sources of light. Light pollution competes with starlight in the night sky for urban residents, inteferes with astronomical observations, and, like any other form of pollution, disrupts ecosystems and has adverse health effects.

To understand the size of this issue, I tried a visual example with two images. One was already published in the blog. It was a series of blind shots (because the stars were almost not visible at plain sight), 12 lights and 3 darks of 20 seconds exposure with the kit lense of the Nikon D3100 at 18mm f3.5. The light pollution was, of course, present as this photographs were taken on a "rural/sub-urban" area around 20Km from the nearest city.

I wanted to run a test and try to take the same frame from a different location, a truly rural location with very little light pollution (this time it was possible to see the milky way even at plain sight so it was easy). This location is around 40 Km from the previous one. The shots were the same with the same lense: 12 lights, 3 darks 20 seconds exposure 18mm at f3.5.

As you can see, the light pollution is a true enemy for the astronomy and, of course, for astrophotography. Next time when you are outside, just look over your heads. If you're in a city you'll be lucky if you can see a bunch of stars...

Enjoy.

Milky Way on Cygnus

Yesterday, at my parent's house (with plenty of light pollution), before the Moon showed up, the night was particularly clear so I took my camera outside. I never saw the Milky Way there and I pointed more or less to the area where it was supposed to be. Sagitarius and Scorpio where to deep in the LP so I pointed to the Northern Cross (Cygnus) hoping to find one of the arms of our galaxy.

After several tries for getting the proper focus I started to shoot at 18mm f/3.5 (kit lens of the Nikon D3100) and got 12 good frames. I took 3 darks and decided to play with it to see if the Milky Way was there.

I must say that I'm pretty pleased with the result of the pictures after the stacking and the processing with Photoshop, maybe I can try to add more color to the image but I don't want to raise the LP. Again, just starting into this ;-).

Milky Way (review)

As I said on my previous post, I give the frames another try on processing with DSS and photoshop. I'm starting to understand a little bit more about the histograms on RGB and how to even the colors or stand out the faint shadows on the dark areas of the Milky Way.

I restacked the same frames as the previous time but with a previous process with photoshop (also on the dark frames to keep the data consistent) just to experiment. The result was more clear once the DSS finished stacking and the top and top-right corners of the image won in detail. After the stacking I played with Photoshop with the curves and levels but this time not only with all the color channels together but with the individual colors.

You're free to tell which one you like most.

Milky Way first try:                                        Milky Way second try:

Milky Way

Later the same night when I took the first shot of the moon,  I decided to give it a try to the Milky Way. It's a photograph that I've been willing to try since I first new about the astrophotography. I read a lot about how to do it and the sky was clear enough to try.

I took my time manually phocusing the 24mm f/2.8 that I borrowed for the ocassion. Tried different ISO configuration and shutter times and then I got started. As I don't have a remote shutter releaser I set the shutter timer to two seconds and hope that it was enough, I started shooting. After 10 shots, the dew started to affect the sharpness of the images so I took a while for cleaning it. Finally, I took 27 shots in RAW that were good enough for me and 7 darks for cleaning the noise of the high ISO.

This is my first attempt on stacking with Deep Sky Stacker. I took the 27 light frames and 7 darks. During the stacking I used only the best 15 frames to a total exposure time of 4min 12s. The moon had just set so there is a lot of light just in the horizon.

I'm pretty happy with the result but I think I can get more information from the frames I have. Once I know more about the program and the process I will give the frames another try. Also I'm pretty new to the curves and levels and probably with more experience I can get more from this image.