A View into the Heart of the Galaxy: Annotated Version
Last night the clouds opened and an unusually transparent sky (for August) permitted naked-eye viewing of the Milky Way from my light-polluted South Huntsville neighborhood.
Nikon D90, Micro-Nikkor 55mm prime f/2.8 working at f/4, ISO 200, 45-sec exposure x 3, no dark or flat calibration files. Celestron Advanced VX equatorial mount. Stacking done with Sequator software.
Lord, this is a sharp lens! It is one my wife bought years ago for macro photography; I subverted it into a career in astrophotography. The Facebook photo compression algorithm fails us here.
Here we see the central bulge of the Milky Way above the teapot of Sagittarius; Saturn is the brightest "star". An airplane crossed the field in two of the exposures.
I annotated the second image with some of the outstanding features of this exceptionally rich zone.
For those interested in imaging the Milky Way, I tried to apply some of the processing recommendations from an article in the January 2018 issue of "Sky & Telescope" titled "Making Your Nightscapes Pop" by Rogelio Bernal Andreo.
A View into the Heart of the Galaxy: Annotated Version
Last night the clouds opened and an unusually transparent sky (for August) permitted naked-eye viewing of the Milky Way from my light-polluted South Huntsville neighborhood.
Nikon D90, Micro-Nikkor 55mm prime f/2.8 working at f/4, ISO 200, 45-sec exposure x 3, no dark or flat calibration files. Celestron Advanced VX equatorial mount. Stacking done with Sequator software.
Lord, this is a sharp lens! It is one my wife bought years ago for macro photography; I subverted it into a career in astrophotography. The Facebook photo compression algorithm fails us here.
Here we see the central bulge of the Milky Way above the teapot of Sagittarius; Saturn is the brightest "star". An airplane crossed the field in two of the exposures.
I annotated the second image with some of the outstanding features of this exceptionally rich zone.
For those interested in imaging the Milky Way, I tried to apply some of the processing recommendations from an article in the January 2018 issue of "Sky & Telescope" titled "Making Your Nightscapes Pop" by Rogelio Bernal Andreo.