Back to gallery

Milky Way over The Pinnacles Desert - 50mm Panorama

Nikon d5100

50mm Nikkor Lens

f1.8

84 x 6 seconds

ISO 5000

 

Stitched in MS ICE

 

This is one of my first full panoramas shot with a 50mm prime lens. It came out of the stitching software at over one gigapixel! After some cropping I managed to get it down to 740 megapixels, so it's by far my biggest panorama to date. I had to experiment with Photoshop's save levels to try and get the final size under Flickr's 200mb limit. To be honest I can't see much difference between the highest save level of 12 and the level I saved this at, which was 9. The file size difference is huge though, 560mb vs 190mb.

 

This was shot at one of my favourite locations for astrophotography, The Pinnacles Desert about 2 hours north of my home city, Perth in Western Australia. This image covers more than 200 degrees of the night sky with the left side at around SSE and the right side around NNE. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are prominent on the left side of the image just above the light pollution from Perth. The foregound was light painted using a hand held spotlight.

48,662 views
385 faves
80 comments
Uploaded on November 13, 2016
Taken on September 28, 2016