Milky Way Path

[GMPhotography]

Here is my most recent Milky Way image. I missed the alignment of the milky way with the path by about a month and a half so to make it really work, I had to flip the path horizontally. For all my milky way images, I use the in-camera astrotracking that my Pentax K3II is equipped with (that is, the sensor moves with the rotation of the earth, to freeze the motion of the stars). So, I had to take 3 images. 2 for the sky for a bit of a panorama and one for the foreground, untracked, to maintain detail and avoid motion blurring. No added light, just a long exposure time (160-180s)

MilkyPathFinal by Greg Murray, on Flickr

[MEB]

That's simply beautiful 

Thank you for sharing.

[jer]

Wonderful how you "kept" the foreground in it since that is the only indicator that Earth is the viewpoint. Excellent!

[GMPhotography]

Thanks gents Love this type of photography. I plan to spend more time on Milky Way next season and as the season comes to end, shift my focus to deeper space when more deep space objects are in view (M42, M31, M32 higher in the sky  etc)

[Jangbu]

Lovely capture!

[Tschens]

Congratulations to this outstanding pic! I tried to make a milkyway pic recently and wonder how you got this intensive lights and colours. My results are somehow in between yours and this one. You say you took 2 pics from the sky. Did you one "normal" one with lets say 20-30 sec of exposure for the stars on the left and right side and one with extra long exposure only for the milky way part?

 

 

[GMPhotography]

Hi Tschens:

 

I shoot with a Pentax k3II which, among other neat tech advancements, has a built in GPS unit. Not so special as Canon and Nikon also have options with GPS, but Pentax is special. Because Pentax has developed and advanced their in-body shake reduction system so much, the decided to take that techonology, along with the GPS data, and come out with a camera whose sensor can track the motion of the stars for up to 5 minutes using data from the GPS. With my 14mm lens, I am able to track the stars for about 3 minutes. (i've done 3, but if the GPS is out a little or has interference, then 2m:40s is perfect). The settings for the sky were: 2x140s tracked, ISO1600, F4.5 14mm. No need for separate exposures for Milky Way VS. other stars.
General rule of thumb is to use the widest aperture you can, but because I can expose for so long, I stop my lens down some to reduce CA and other distortions.

If I were you, I'd try shooting: 10-15 frames of 15s (turn off noise reduction!), ISO 6400 14mm f2.8 (or comparable) and stack them in Starry Landscape Stacker, or manually in Affinity Photo. It'd be nice if Serif would develop more features for Astrophotography purposes; I find the stacking to be quite slow and a huge resource hog compared to other stand alone stacking software; I can stack 10s-100s of images in other programs but AP simply freezes beyond 11-12. My machine has a role to play in that, but still, other programs are far more efficient (Starry Landscape Stacker, Starry Sky Stacker, Nebulosity, PixInsight etc.)