Northern Lights + Milky Way

[GMPhotography]

Here are two of my first night shots with my Pentax K3II and Astrotracing function. Background and foreground shots blended together in Affinity, otherwise the foregrounds would have been blurry due to the movement of the sensor as it tracked the stars.

Moderator Lee gave me a few tips withthe Northern Lights shot, as I was having much difficulty blending them. The Milky way shot has very flat edges where foreground meets sky, so it was very easy for me to replace. Most other work done in Lightroom.

 

[GMPhotography]

I'll share from my Flickr page from now :) just read the top post ;)

[justwilliam]

Wow! These really put the 'awe' in awesome. Thanks for sharing.

[Lee D]

Really nice  :)

[GaryC]

Excellent

[Madame]

Fantastic! Well done!

[peter]

How? This has got to be explained in a tutorial. Pinterest fodder

The 2nd pic is very Brian Cox B) give him a call!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/914Bd68dRhL._SL1500_.jpg

[GMPhotography]

How? This has got to be explained in a tutorial. Pinterest fodder

The 2nd pic is very Brian Cox B) give him a call!

 

Peter, it was taken withthe newest Pentax flagship DSLR, the K3II. If you know much about Pentax, then you'd know that they have in body shake reduction via motors the sensor is mounted to. The motors move teh sensor in the X, Y, and Z axis to negate any hand shake that is going on.

WIth the K5 and up they started selling a GPS unit as an add on that attached to the cameras hotshoe. THe GPS then used the in body shake reduction system to move the sensor at teh same rate the earth rotates. Wit the K3II though, the GPS came built in, so all I have to do is calibrate teh GPS by rotating the camera on the three axis', put it on my tripod and using Bulb mode, I can track the stars for up to 5 minutes, depending on what focal length is used. The longer the length, the less time you can track. All this without any other extra equipment or expensive Equilatoral mounts. Since tracking the stars blurs the foreground, I then have to turn off the GPS and take another untracked version of the photo to keep the foreground sharp. Each of the tracked images that I used above were both around 155s in length and ISO 1600, f2.8 @ 14mm. That's where Affinity Photo comes in. Since I only use Lightroom, I needed a program that would allow me to blend the two images and throw away the parts I didn't want, like a blurred foreground or stars with a trail.

I wouldn't reccomend using the astrotracing function on the Pentax line for many Aurora shots, as you can quickly over expose the lights and you lose the movement. I got away with it this noght because they weren't that strong and there wasn't much movement anyway, just a blob in the sky.

If you were to want to try this, you'd need to buy a pentax, or get yourself set up with thousands of dollars worth of a tracking mount, which would be even better than the camera though.

[peter]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm not familiar with High end Pentax gear.

 

I am however, the own of a Fuji bridge camera (S1790).

 

peter