Milky Way, Rho Ophiuchi, and Friends over Antelope Island State Park

Here’s my first experiment at a Milky Way nightscape photography which includes sufficient exposures and processing to highlight some deep space objects, such as Rho Ophiuchi (that colorful patch behind stars which “bleeds” dark nebula into the Milky Way), which normally don’t make an appearance in already-beautiful Milky Way landscape photography.

 

This was taken at Antelope Island State Park, Utah (Bortle 4), on April 19, 2021. The bright patch of light in the bottom left-hand section is the light pollution dome over Salt Lake City. The assorted red patches through the Milky Way and in surrounding areas are emission nebula (most prominent in the nebula Sh2-27, a red patch around the star Zeta Ophiuchi toward the top of the composition), which don’t typically show up in images captured by off-the-shelf cameras.

 

It may go without saying, but this sort of photography brings out detail far, far beyond what we can make out with our crumby eyeballs. Although everyone ought to experience, at least once, what the Milky Way looks like in the night sky under truly dark skies after our eyes have fully acclimated to the darkness. You know, in my rather biased opinion.

 

Technical Details

 

Multiple photographs were shot for the sky and the for the foreground. Photos were taken with an Olympus E-M1 Mk.III and the Olympus 7-14/2.8 Pro lens. Additional data was used for emission nebula (see below).

 

Sky Photographs

45x45 seconds 9mm f/2.8 ISO 640

62x45 seconds 14mm f/2.8 ISO 640

Two series of sky photographs were taken. One focused on the Milky Way and the full field of view and featured the top of the mountain below for placement, and a second series zoomed in more narrowly focused on Rho Ophiuchi and fainter deep space objects appearing to the right of the Milky Way. Dark and bias frames were used; flat frames were not—I forgot my equipment to take flats frames in the dark of night—but should have been. Photos were stacked and initially processed, aligned, and cleaned up in PixInsight, stars separated, and then passed on to Adobe Photoshop.

 

Landscape Photographs

10x60 seconds 14mm f/6.3 ISO 200

These photographs were stacked and aligned in Adobe Photoshop (allows for bringing out more detail and better colors with less noise) and captured while the moon was still up for some natural light (sky photos captured while the moon was down).

 

Nebulosity

Some wide angle data of nebulous regions (red patches) was used from some other photographs I’ve captured was used to bring out the red/pinkish regions in the photo. My Olympus camera has not been modified to pick up more red-spectrum light, otherwise this data would have come through properly in the original exposures.

 

Adobe Photoshop

The final images of the sky and foreground were combined in Adobe Photoshop in position and scale true to the landscape and night sky and edited/blended with masks.

 

A Couple Thoughts

Next time, I’ll capture more data, and be fussed to capture flat frames. I’ll spend more time getting my mask separating sky from foreground right the first time. An astro-modified interchangeable lens camera would be nice to capture the emission nebulosity if I made a habit of this. In the future I’ll stick to very dark skies. It was unpleasant to process out deep sky detail, without flats, in an image which scaled from fairly dark skies to the intensely bright light pollution above Salt Lake City, although I’m glad I did this once as an homage to the city I live in.

Done