Milky Way!

[Ash Telecaster]

I tried to get some star shots this weekend but the weather was against me. Maybe this coming weekend.

When I first bought my SkyGuider to take longer exposures of stars, it was over a week before weather was clear enough to attempt it! Frustrating when the weather doesn't cooperate. Are you trying to shoot Milkyway or just star trailes, or something else?

Hi Basil,

Trying to get the Milky Way. I'm not sure it's the best time of year for it but the the moon is rising very late right now so I thought it might work out.

P.S. Nice Rickenbacker!

 

[BasilFawlty]

Hi Basil,

Trying to get the Milky Way. I'm not sure it's the best time of year for it but the the moon is rising very late right now so I thought it might work out.

P.S. Nice Rickenbacker!

If you don't already have it, I highly recommend the App "PhotoPills" for planning Milkyway shots. Outstanding App for night photo shooting/ planning.

PS: Thanks, it's a limited edition John Lennon Signature (12 string variant)

 

[Dikkie]

I've shot it here:
Question about Milky Way shots

It depends where exactly you are on this planet. I read: "especially for those in the Northern Hemisphere where February through September is the optimal times"
But in summer, the sky doesn't get fully black or dark enough to photograph all the stars.

Retry end august/september on a clear sky.
In an area where you have no light pollution, difficult to find in my region.

 

[photo1x1.com]

I also recommend photopills. Their Night AR works really very well for planning.

Maybe these photos help you get an idea which focal length creates what sort of angle of view of the milky way.

The key factor beside focussing really is the dark sky. The first was shot on a rather dark spot, the second one with a city of 2million 3miles behind the camera on a VERY clear night (usually I hardly see any stars here). You just faintly see the milky way. I also took a screenshot of www.lightpollutionmap.info so that you can see in which category those two are in regard to darkness and maybe compare it to where you are going.

Also important: the higher up in the sky the milky way center is, the better.

 

[Ash Telecaster]

Nice photos!

I've given up temporarily as there has just been way too much have or outright cloud cover/rain. I tried getting Jupiter too but what I mostly saw was atmospheric distortion.

 

[TCampbell]

Nice photos!

I've given up temporarily as there has just been way too much have or outright cloud cover/rain. I tried getting Jupiter too but what I mostly saw was atmospheric distortion.

That's normal for planets. The issue with plans is that they have a very small angular size. The moon, for example, is roughly 30 arc-minutes from edge to edge. Jupiter, on the other hand, is a mere 44 arc-minutes edge to edge (and that's only because we are roughly a month after 'opposition' (opposition is typically when we are at the closest point in our orbits -- that's not strictly true due to the slightly elliptical shapes of our orbits, but it works as a generalization). But this small size means it takes almost nothing to distort the image.

To image planets, an astrophotographers will typically shoot 30 seconds worth of video at a fairly high frame rate *and* at a at a fairly high focal ratio (e.g. something around f/25-f/30 range but it really depends on the size of the scope and the pixel pitch of the camera sensor).

The video frames are stacked using a program such as AutoStakkert ... and then processed further to improve contrast using wavelet processing, etc. (there are numerous articles and YouTube videos on how to do this).

The stacking algorithm goes through all the frames and looks for just the best of the bunch (it is sometimes called "lucky imaging" because from time to time in all that distortion you get the occasional clear frames.). You might take the best 10% and reject the rest (or maybe even less than the best 10%). Only the best frames get stacked.

Jupiter is a fast spinning planet. Damien Peach (arguably one of the best planetary imagers in the world) recommends you don't get more than 30 seconds worth of video frames. This is because the spin of the planet means that as you overlay more frames, you can create blur in the image because the they don't match up. You might think 30 seconds is crazy for such a huge planet (it completes a rotation roughly every 10 hours). Even the least conservative planetary images wont grab more than 2 minutes worth of frames ... but the better images who do grab more data will use de-rotation software like WinJupos to "de-rotate" the frames.

Traditional camera sensors aren't very good at this. I use a ZWO ASI174MM (that's the camera make & model) because it has an electronic "global" shutter instead of an electronic "rolling" shutter (which is what most DSLRs use). This allows it to have a particularly fast frame rate (that particular camera can shoot 160 frames per second at full resolution and the real issue is whether the computer can keep up with the high rate that the data is coming in *because* you want non-lossy frames and many video algorithms use lossy-compression algorithms.

It's a bit more work to acquire and process than traditional photography.