Dark sky in Hawaii

My wife and I spent a week on the north part of the Big Island of Hawaii, in the Kohala mountain region. The skies there are incredibly dark and transparent with almost no light pollution straight up and just a small amount 35 miles to the south in Kona. In fact we measured the light pollution level to be mag 21.36, which is almost identical to what it is on Mauna Kea on the 9000 foot level.

So here is a Milky Way shot, a single 30 second exposure taken with my Sony NEX-7 camera with wide field lens set to 18mm at F4. The camera was attached to my little Vixen Polarie sidereal tracker with only perfunctory polar alignment.

Rolando

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While we were there, our friend and local astronomy nut, Chris Erickson, let me use his 130EDF refractor, set on his 900 mount to do a little higher resolution shots of some Milky Way objects.

I have always enjoyed scanning the southern part of the Milky way with binoculars and two of my favorite bino object were M6 and M7. To me M6 looks like a butterfly in a 10x50 bino, so I tried to capture this effect in the image. M7 is right in the thick of the Milky Way, so this was processed to show the structure of our galaxy with M7 somewhat overexposed. Both of these images are single 10 minute RGB exposures with my QSI 683 camera, guided with the little Lodestar camera, processed in MaximDL.

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