My Milky Way Pictures

[Nerwin]

I've been doing photography now for a few years and I just started to get my feet wet in astrophotography and I wanted to share with you guys what I've been up to the last few years.  

 

Took these with my Nikon D7000 and 12-24 f/4 & 35 f/1.8.

Edited July 2, 2014 by Nerwin

[NoelC]

Nice job, Nicholas.  I envy you for the dark skies you have.

 

Astrophotography is more difficult than people realize.  You're off to a great start!

 

Your shots go plenty deep (i.e., they're brightly exposed), revealing not only the light of the milky way but also a large number of nebulae.  Note the small pink glowing areas - that's ionized hydrogen gas.

 

At some point you may want to look into devices that move your camera to track the stars, e.g., an "Astrotrac" or similar.  Such devices allow you to take even longer exposures without showing trailing in the stars.

 

Something else to ponder..  You can take multiple shots and "stack" them (e.g., with Photoshop or an astrophotography program), which tends to average out the noise and make things look even more crisp and clean.

 

Keep up the good work!

 

-Noel

Edited July 2, 2014 by NoelC

[dencorso]

Great pics indeed, Nicholas!

Well, since NoelC wrote about it, the really tricky part is how to align two pictures, so... here're two how-to's for two different programs: PicWinPro and PhotoShop. And, in any case, once you get there, by all means, do explore the Astropix site more fully than just the two pages I gave links for. Enjoy!

[vinifera]

sweet

[Tripredacus]

I always wondered about the photos people can take where you can see the milky way. On some nights I can see a "blur" in the night sky that I suspect is the galaxy edge. I can see stars fairly well in the city. I used to hang around at an observatory, but it was at a time before I knew viewing the galaxy was possible.

[Nerwin]

I would love to get a telescope with a camera mount, but it won't be no hubble telescope

Thanks for the tips guys, I completely forgot about image stacking. On the next night it's perfectly clear and when the Milky Way is visible, I'll give it shot.

[NoelC]

You might find that the tree edges will be blurred if you align the stars, but you can really supersede the limitations of the camera gear (which are amazingly good already with today's models) by stacking.

 

-Noel

[dencorso]

Signal grows with the number of pics, while noise, bing random, can be shown to grow just with the square-root of the number of pics, on stacking. This means that if one sums the pics and then divides by the number of pics to normalize, the noise will be effectively reduced with the inverse square-root of the number of pics. This function can be seen represented in the attachment, but it all boils down to the fact that stacking 4 pics reduces the noise to 50% of the original noise, 6 will get one to 40% and 10, to about 30%, but further improvement requires more and more pics, and is not worthwhile. My take is 4 pics gets one the best overall cost/benefit.

[Monroe]

Very nice pictures ... thanks for sharing, I've never seen the Milky Way look like that.