Summer Milky Way

This is a stack of two 30-second images taken with my Canon 1Ds Mark II and the Canon EF 24mm f/1.4L USM lens wide open, unguided and just on a tripod. The images were registered with Registar and combined in Photoshop. I intended to take a series of 12 images, but I messed up the timer settings, and only got these two. Amazingly, these were taken at ISO 3200, which is very sensitive but has surprisingly little noise.

Jeff

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Hi Jeff,

That's really nice. It would be great to do a mosaic across the sky. I think to do that you would need to be on the tripod to get the camera at the right angles for each shot.

Perhaps go for 20 secs and take more to get more sharpness. Also on the digital group Pertti has done a great eval of various lens. Typically they perform sharpest one or two stops above their maximum, so perhaps F2 for this one at 20 secs and 10 of each spot in a series for a mosaic.

Also, if you have a fisheye lens you can get the whole sky in one hit. Peter Ward has posted a stunning Milky Way showing the lot in one go.


Its one of my future projects.
Greg.

One other thing. ISO 3200 on the Canon I believe is no different to ISO 1600. Just from what I have gleaned from the Astro-digital group.

If your camera was modded you could get the same brightness on 20 seconds or less, maybe even 10 - 15.

Greg.

Killer photo Jeff!