Report: Hunting the Milky Way

Having never actually captured the Milky Way (that big ol' galaxy of ours) I went on an adventure last week and took advantage of a relatively clear evening. I drove over to the Isle of Sheppey, in order to find as darker skies as I could within a reasonable distance. A 25 minute drive saw me in the middle of a number of fields, surrounded by a country path, some noisy birds and, well, that was about it. See the red dot on the map!

I'm going to travel to a few places around my area to find dark skies, and to find appropriate places I could set up my new tracking mount, without getting too much unwanted attention.

I took my camera and tripod out, and once parked up positioned the tripod just outside my car window -using a wired remote I was able to snap shots of the night sky without leaving my seat.

As it got darker, and my eyes adjusted, the milky way became more and more visible to the naked eye as a misty streak of stars drifting from one horizon to the other. I took a few hundred photos, but only happy with a few - it seems the milky way is a pretty tough target regardless of its size. Balancing the exposure to capture the feint stars, without filling the shot with light pollution was also a challenge.

The below shot was my favourite from the night, with the Milky Way clearly visible rising up above the horizon. The majority of the light pollution came from over the water in Whitstable. I may in future try move further West to reduce the light pollution, but like with many aspects of astrophotography - trial and error seems to be the way forward.

An adventure into space

My first lunar capture (September 2008)
1/200, f3.5, ISO 64, 303mm

I'm not quite sure how to begin, it feels as though I should be all excited and enthusiastic about this new journey into the realms of astrophotography.

But in truth, I've been doing astrophotography longer than I have been into photography. The photo on the right was taken on the 13th September 2008. Back before I knew what DSLR's were, before I was regularly uploading photos to Flickr, and before I had any idea how seriously I'd get into the hobby. I had a Fujifilm Finepix S5700, a simple inexpensive point-and-shoot which had a 10x optical zoom. Having figured out what manual was, I captured this shot at 10x zoom on a tripod outside my window. I remember it being a big accomplishment, as I didn't think such photos were possible without huge telescopes or big fancy lenses. I think with a bit of time and effort (same with a lot of things) you are able to push the boundaries laid out by your equipment.

Since then, I've managed to advance a little further into astrophotography, having captured photos of Saturn, Jupiter and more recently the Sun. As astrophotography is a huge hobby to get into, requiring a lot of patience (and money), I'm using this website as a way to monitor my progress and share my favorite photos, whilst sharing what I have learnt to help others going through the same process.

I've invested in a Celestron CG-5 GoTo tracking mount, which (once aligned after a few frustrating hours!) allows you to take long exposures of the night sky, by cancelling out the earths orbit effecting the movement on the stars. This is one of the first steps into capturing deep-sky objects (DSO's) which require longer exposures due to being so feint and not visible to the naked eye. A photo of the CG5 will be in the Equipment page linked here.