Milky Way

This is about my third try at photographing the Milky Way and this was the first time I managed to get recognizable results.

 

This is the Milky Way directly overhead last night at about 10 o'clock. The photo is comprised of 8 30 second exposures combined in photoshop. As is obvious around the perimeter of the image, the realigning wasn't perfect. But my 6 year old lap top was moaning and beginning to smoke trying to process 8 layers at 12 mbs each.

 

I have DeepSkyStacker on Betsy's laptop, so I may try to combine the images on that to see if they come out even better.

 

ISO was set at 800.

 

There's still a lot of noise in this picture, but fortunately I figured out how to turn on the noise reduction in my camera (after this above shots were taken), so future shots should be even better.

 

I figured out that the LiveView option on the XSI makes it easier to focus in on stars which makes for a much more crisp image

 

If you pull up the big image, you can start to see some star trails, so the next step for me will be a equatorial mount to allow for longer exposurse. Luckily, my fiance's father has one, so hopefully I get to experiment with that soon.

 

I also hope to get the 50mm f/1.8 lense here soon. It has much better light gathering ability than the kit lense and will make for better pictures.

 

There appears to be a few interesting objects in the image, but my astronomy is no where near good enough to identify any of them. Hats off to anyone who wants to help identify things in the comments or with notes. That would, like, totally rock.

Done