Milkyway nightscapes

S.R.M. wrote in post #18422592
Nice work Dennis! A typical winter morning in SEQ

S.R.M. wrote in post #18422593
A couple of reprocessed panoramas from the Parkes Radio Telescope in mid July. The foreground was illuminated by the last quarter Moon, which gave the sky a nice blue hue (but made it more of a challenge to bring out the Milky Way details). Larger versions on Flickr.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/WLsP​65 Milky Way over "The Dish" by Stephen Mudge, on Flickr

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/WLsQ​df Milky Way over "The Dish" by Stephen Mudge, on Flickr

S.R.M. wrote in post #18422593
A couple of reprocessed panoramas from the Parkes Radio Telescope in mid July. The foreground was illuminated by the last quarter Moon, which gave the sky a nice blue hue (but made it more of a challenge to bring out the Milky Way details). Larger versions on Flickr.

nero_design wrote in post #18416147
[ABOVE image] Taken with the EOS 6D + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens and a 77mm NiSi Natural Night Filter.

We've had some cold but VERY clear skies here in Sydney (Australia) this last week. I took the opportunity to drive to my favorite lookout - which is situated 1,625 feet above sea level... high enough to be above a good portion of the city smog. In fact you can see the haze layer way down below whenever you visit this spot, even at night. I took a picture of the camera I was using while waiting for the sky to darken enough to see the Milky Way. Right now (July), the Galactic Core of the Milky Way is directly overhead at around 8pm and the sun sets at around 5pm. The lilac-tint on the first image is from using a 77mm NiSi Natural Night Filter - which was designed to filter out the yellow hues from Sodium Street Lights at night. Whilst it makes for amazing skies, I did not use this filter for the Milky Way shot from the EOS-M6 camera because I need a step-down filter ring for mounting it to the much smaller lens.

I took the second image (of the core of the Milky Way... see below) with the relatively tiny Canon EOS M6 Mirrorless camera... and whilst I had an array of lenses to chose from, I opted to use the very inexpensive EF-M 22mm f/2.0 STM lens. This lens was selling for just $99 in the United States at one point... but demand and newer EOS-M camera releases have driven the price back to it's RRP of around $199... which is still pretty awesome. I had to tease out some of the finer details during editing, but the results were surprisingly good. I chose a Tungsten WB because I've found that it seems to enhance the nebulous-red areas of the star-forming regions of the Milky Way. No filter used. Color-sampling from the captured image enabled me to enhance the colors slightly. I took the liberty of adding some diffraction spikes to Saturn - which was crossing the Milky Way at the time (see the bright blue "star" near the darkest dustlane). I took both of these images in RAW for a change. This is also the first time I've used RAW since 2004.

DETAILS: Single RAW exposure at 22mm @ f/2.2 @ 20 seconds @ ISO 2000. 2-second built-in self timer used.

[ABOVE image] The resulting image taken with the EOS M6 Mirrorless camera + EF-M 22mm f/2.0 STM lens

rezcar wrote in post #18422801
Love the composition on these!

nardes wrote in post #18422724
These are very nice and clean Stephen. I like the relaxed processing, they look very natural. You must have enjoyed a lot of data to play with!

Cheers

Dennis