Milky Way over the Lake

1st one is great Well done.

Thanks guys!!

nice! is that m31 in the first one?

m31 m32, whatever it takes (I have no idea what you are talking about)

M31 is the Andromeda galaxy, out "next door" neighbor only 2.5 million light years away. Fuzzy thing in 1st shot in the middle just off to the right. it's also in the 3rd, far left...middle height. Ironically M32 is right beside Andromeda but it's too faint to see in your pics. You should try stacking pictures will Deep Sky Stacker (free by the way). You can combine several 30 sec pictures, called light frames, and get what is adds up to a much longer exposure. Lower you ISO to 800, take 6 30 sec images and stack them to get one 3 min exposure. You'll also want to add a couple of "dark frames" where you leave the settings the same but leave the lens cap on. DSS will use the dark frames to remove the noise created b your camera.

Nice tips Toxic Coolaid

As for the exposure, i've read that the time should be: 600/(focal length in 35mm). Example: if you used the 11-16 @16mm, the equivalent in 35mm would be 25.6. So the maximum exposure -to avoid trails- should be: Exp=600/25.6=23".

PS. I was kinda rude, as I forgot to to congratulate mckinleypics, for his great pictures. The first one (3664) is my personal choice

Some people think 600/fl is too long, and use 500/fl instead. I haven't tried it to see which works best, but since M31 is rather far North, 600/fl may work ok.

Nice stuff!

Toxic Coolaid wrote in post #12739286
M31 is the Andromeda galaxy, out "next door" neighbor only 2.5 million light years away. Fuzzy thing in 1st shot in the middle just off to the right. it's also in the 3rd, far left...middle height. Ironically M32 is right beside Andromeda but it's too faint to see in your pics. You should try stacking pictures will Deep Sky Stacker (free by the way). You can combine several 30 sec pictures, called light frames, and get what is adds up to a much longer exposure. Lower you ISO to 800, take 6 30 sec images and stack them to get one 3 min exposure. You'll also want to add a couple of "dark frames" where you leave the settings the same but leave the lens cap on. DSS will use the dark frames to remove the noise created b your camera.

Funny you should mention that. My plan was to take a bunch of pictures and do just that - downloading the software when I got home. However, I had no idea what the settings should be. After an hour I figured I was wasting my time (which I was because I was using 5 sec exposures at iso 100). So I thought, well, might as well open her up and get at least something. The result was basically what you see in picture 1. I was delighted and continued snapping similar pictures, which all looked about the same, so I started moving around and taking different angles.

I was wondering what that bright light was (you mention it is M31 - very cool!)

incredible

Great shots...