Now that the Milky Way core will start fading from our view I managed to take a few shots with Cygnus. The raw images were actually horrible. Massive coma and all sorts of distortions in the corners which I attribute to lack of technique but also the quality of the lens. After some cropping and editing the result is surprisingly nice.

I love seeing the soft colours evolve from west to east and the summer triangle in the centre. I’ll experiment more with this view once I got my tracking fully working.

I gathered a couple more Milky Way shots over 2 nights. I tried experimenting a bit with foreground settings and different ISO levels.

For processing I stacked everything in sequator (including a couple dark frames which fixed all the hot pixels) and then processed everything with my regular Pixinsight procedures. Finally I used some layers in gimp for the foreground/background.

Pixinsight is probably overkill for this stuff but I wouldn’t know how to do all of this in gimp anyway.

In other news, I found a second hand Move Shoot Move tracker (one of the first generations I believe) so I will be tracking next time. I can imagine taking the whole setup with me on any trips in the future.

Summer is slowly coming to an end so I’m starting to think about next projects which will be most likely deep sky again.

This week we had clear skies with limited moon presence so I was finally able to try a milky way shot.

I got the Canon 6D a while ago, I found it cheap on a second hand website and as a bonus it came astromodded with an Irix 15 mm lens.

After a two hour drive I set up in a bortle 4 spot. I did it without too much planning with the hope that the southern horizon would look semi decent.

I’m very pleased with the final result. There are a couple of things that could be improved such as hot pixel removal (I didn’t take any dark frames) and figuring out how to blend a nice foreground with the Milky Way. I should be out again soon for another shot.