Working on my night shots for the elk hunt this year. This image is made up of 6 pictures stitched together and edited in photoshop. Hoping there will be a lot less light pollution in the back country.
TXCO,
Fist off, fellow Texan here.
As for the image. I used a Canon 6D and a 50mm lens. I set the aperture to 2.0 aperture, the ISO to 10,000 and expose the images for 10 seconds. For this length of exposure a good, sturdy tripod is necessary. After that I merged the photos together using photoshop and then adjusted the contrast, exposure and sharpness. This is my fourth or fifth attempt at the milky way and I think it is my best so far. The other important thing is time of year and location. The darker the sky the better and, here in Texas, this portion of the milky way is only visible from about March to early October.
Let me know if you have any specific questions and maybe we can start a new thread to get into more detail.
tipsntails7,
The main reason for the higher ISO was because I was trying to keep the exposure length down in order to keep the stars from streaking, like a star trail. On a full frame camera with a 50mm lens this starts to happen at about 10 seconds. So in order to keep the exposure time at 10 seconds and my aperture at 2.0 I had to adjust the ISO to get as much light as possible. Also, I agree the upload does not look as good as it does full size. Do you know what the ideal image size in pixels to upload is?
For this website I don't, you would need to ask Ryan Avery, and it may be that this website does not allow super high res photos in not sure. Although I've always seen photos imbedded with a photobucket link turn out better then those dropped in straight to the site.
Yeah, hosting photos at photobucket, google photos or some other site is much easier.
I agree that ISO 10,000 seems a bit high for f2.0 at 10s. I have a 50mm f1.8 but I have never really messed with night shots with it. At 50mm you get star trails fairly quickly. I rather prefer my 14mm f2.8 where I can get 25s exposures without trails. Then again, my new Pentax K-3II has a cool feature called Astrotracer which will allow me to take up to 5 minute exposures.
Pentax gaining a following on this forum. Good to see old school camera giants regain prominence. Pentax putting out some really good bodies as of late. And unlike Sony they have lenses to suit anyone.