Milky Way Panorama

 September 13 2015

8 image Panorama of the Milky Way (LRGB) Nikon D610 + Nikkor 50mm f1.8 @ 2.8

September 12, 2015 was a perfect night for stargazing. There was no moon, no wind and the skies are clear. I headed out to Pasqua Lake for a nights stay at our friends cabin and i thought i would like to do a proper field test for my Skywatcher StarAdventurer mount. Unlike my full size equatorial mount, the StarAdventurer is a no brainer when it comes to portability. At around 10 P.M, I headed out and did some static shots before polar aligning. Polar alignment was quick and easy. I really love the illuminated polar scope.  At first, I used my 14mm f2.8 lens but found out it was too wide to do a proper panorama without stretching the edges, good thing i had my 50mm f1.8 on my bag. I pointed the camera where the Milky Way is rising and manually aligned my field of view. After some test shots i thought i had the Milky Way centered. I started at the horizon and  worked my way up with a 5 minute exposure each.  There was still a bit of light pollution so i had to balance the ISO and exposure time and settled at ISO 800.

Before processing after stitching, horizon glow on the left

I used Photoshop CS6 to automatically stitch the images and did some quick color adjustments on Lightroom before importing it back to Photoshop.  There were lots of stars on the image and they obscure the details of the Milky Way so i removed some of them using the dust and scratches filter. I tried using the LRGB process and found out it was the best way to bring out the details for  shots with a bit of light pollution. A 5-minute shot has plenty of details  in it but remember that it increases the light pollution background as well. LRGB or Luminance +RGB (red, green,blue) is a process where you have a color data and a black & white data from the same image and you process them separately  and later on blend them together using the Luminosity blend mode on Photoshop . This gives you way more data to work on  the raw image files. I am still working on my image editing process for astrophotos, but  my field test for the StarAdventurer was pretty successful and I  would do a Milky Way panorama again under real dark skies...hopefully next summer.

Pleiades (M45)

August 23 2015

(M45) The Pleiades Star Cluster taken from my light polluted backyard

The Pleiades

Nikon D610 + Skywatcher ED80

Skywatcher EQ-3 Synscan + Orion SS Autoguider 

5 minutes x 46 @ iso 400

Stacked in DeepSkyStacker