In late June we had an extended string of days/nights without clouds. So this was a good time to update my Milky Way photographs using an ultra-wide fisheye lens. I did a similar photo shoot in May of last year. As before, I shot from a pullout on the Mormon Lake Village road which gives me a clear view over the top of the lake.


The big difference between last year and this year is a new camera. I upgraded from my Nikon D750 to a Nikon D850. The latter has 45 megapixels; the former has 24 megapixels. Big difference and it should result in better resolution of the stars.
I shot two sets of photographs. One set was on an iOptron SkyTracker to follow the motion of the stars; the second set was without tracking to photograph the foreground. Exposure time for both was 300 seconds and were shot with a Rokinon 12mm F2.8 full frame fisheye lens. As a consequence of the fisheye lens the Milky Way appears curved.
The two sets of images (foreground, stars) were then blended together using Photoshop. The result was imported into Siril, an astrophotography software package, to reduce the stars using the Starnet package. Both the normal star image and the reduced star image are shown here.
It should be noted that there was a lot of airglow that evening and the reduced star image helps to see the structure and waves present in the airglow.
It was a successful and fun evening of astrophotography shooting.