Central Oregon Photos

[Scrumhalf]

OK guys...made it back last night!

Still haven't processed my images, but here is one shot, unedited except for some brightness/contrast adjustments. I need to read up on how to process night shots to get them to look as good as possible, but it looks reasonable right now, I think!

Milky Way looking South. The dark skies are INCREDIBLE in Central Oregon.

[BEAST]

Awesome shot scrum! :grin:

I'm looking at it on my phone and it already looks great. I think if you bring the temperature under 5k it'll bring out the whites and blues.

[Scrumhalf]

Thanks, Beast! Processing these shots is a whole new chapter of learning, I am finding out lol....

[Bouncer]

amazing shot. crazy how much light polution blocks out. damn shame.

[blm]

Amazing. What kind of lens did you use?

[Scrumhalf]

BLM, that was with a Rokinon 14mm F2.8 ultra wide angle lens. It's a real cheap lens, about 200 bucks and is manual focus only. But it is very sharp for the money. You've got to pay about 5 times as much to get a Canon that rivals it in image quality.

[blm]

Like bouncer said about light pollution, it's amazing. I really thought it took a powerful zoom lens to capture images like that.

[Scrumhalf]

No, zoom lenses are great for taking tight shots of specific objects, like a planet. What you want for Milky Way shots is a wide angle lens that captures a large portion of the sky. It's all about giving the camera enough time to collect light. This shot is actually 4 shots stacked together. Basically I took 4 consecutive shots, each 30 seconds long. Then I used software to combine the images to reduce the noise. 30 seconds is about as long as I can go at 14mm before the rotation of the earth causes the starts to shift and look like streaks instead of dots. But 30 seconds is not enough time for the camera to collect enough light to bring out the details, so you need to stack multiple shots.

The second day, I took a shot of the Andromeda galaxy but this time, I put my camera on a tracker that rotates the camera to counteract the rotation of the earth. This allows longer exposures. I took 2 minute exposures with this and I'll post those later - they need more processing.

[blm]

*mind blown* lol

[lipripper]

WOW!!! Good stuff Scrum!!

[Chadd77]

No, zoom lenses are great for taking tight shots of specific objects, like a planet. What you want for Milky Way shots is a wide angle lens that captures a large portion of the sky. It's all about giving the camera enough time to collect light. This shot is actually 4 shots stacked together. Basically I took 4 consecutive shots, each 30 seconds long. Then I used software to combine the images to reduce the noise. 30 seconds is about as long as I can go at 14mm before the rotation of the earth causes the starts to shift and look like streaks instead of dots. But 30 seconds is not enough time for the camera to collect enough light to bring out the details, so you need to stack multiple shots.

The second day, I took a shot of the Andromeda galaxy but this time, I put my camera on a tracker that rotates the camera to counteract the rotation of the earth. This allows longer exposures. I took 2 minute exposures with this and I'll post those later - they need more processing.

That's exactly what I would have done too! lol

Beautiful picture scrum!

[Ashoprep]

Man that's cool

[MattG]

Amazing Scrum! Looks like something out of a Ntl. Geographic magazine or something. Cant wait to see the other ones :thumb:

[Bouncer]

Cant wait to see the other ones :thumb:

i fully expect every single pic to be better than this one! :thankyou:

[teufelhunden13]

That is gorgeous. Great picture.