The first shot is Dublin was enough to get me excited, but take away that moist ocean air and replace it with a dry desert sky and things really start to shape up. Here’s my second attempt at capturing the Milky Way and the first one I consider successful. May many more follow with even more breathtaking views into our amazing home in the universe.
My first successful shot of the Milky Way, just an hour and a half west of Tucson at the base of Kitt Peak. After about three hours and about three hundred source images, this appears to be the only one that came out – a composition of thirty-two twelve-second exposures on ISO6400 at f/4.5.
My last attempt in Dublin gave me high expectations, but I was using my “nifty fifty” which opens up all the way to f/1.8 and really screams for a little lens. It’s hard to beat the wide-angle view though that my 10-18mm provides.
Desert astrophotography is great: 80º in the middle of the night, 48% relative humidity, and an amazing sky. It was easy to see the Milky Way with unaided eyesight, but it was nothing more than a cloudy white streak across the horizon above. The ground illumination came purely from our own galaxy while…
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the afterburner 