I have taken countless photographs of the Milky Way using anything from ultrawide to telephoto lenses. But I have never taken a photograph of the Milky Way with a fisheye lens until now.
I like the result because it shows a large part of the Milky Way from south of the Galactic Center northward almost–but not quite–to Cassiopeia. Cygnus can be seen in the center.
As a bonus there is some banded airglow along the eastern horizon.
Clear skies and light winds presented an opportunity to photograph the Milky Way with reflections in smooth water. Upper Lake Mary had the best orientation to look down the lake. In addition, accessing this lake is very easy with a parking lot just a short distance from where the image was taken. Finally, another factor is this past winter had a lot of snowmelt that filled the lake to capacity for the first time in several years.
It’s interesting that the star colors are more saturated in the reflections compared to the sky.
The glow on the right is the light dome from Phoenix.
There were plenty of caveats associated with the tau Herculids meteor shower. It could be a full-blown meteor storm or it could be a total bust. But there was a third possibility; not a meteor storm but a shower, or maybe a drizzle.
Of course I was hoping for the storm but was quite happy with the shower. I had a few ideas of how to shoot this but ended up going with the Keep It Simple concept. I ended up at a viewpoint on the west side of Mormon Lake and aimed the camera at the rising Milky Way.
A review of my images showed that I captured three very bright meteors and another six that were fairly dim. The first image is a composite of those images and shows the entire field of view from the ultra-wide 17mm lens. It has a field of view of 93° x 70°.
The next image is a tight crop of the three brightest meteors that also shows two dim meteors.
Time-lapse video of the three brightest tau Herculids meteors and some persistent smoke trails.
Finally, there is a time-lapse video of the three brightest showing the persistent smoke trails from two meteors.
We are entering Milky Way season—generally considered to be March through September in the northern hemisphere. In mid-March the Milky Way does not rise until well after midnight and the Galactic Center of the Milky Way is only about 25° degrees above the horizon by astronomical twilight.
Accompanying the Milky Way was the waxing crescent Moon which was 77% illuminated on the morning of 13 March 2022. The Moon would set around 0413 MST and twilight did not start until 0516 MST.
What this means is that I could photograph the landscape with the Moon illuminating it and then an hour or so later capture the Milky Way after the Moon had set and the sky was very dark.
I arrived with bright moonlight illuminating Cathedral Rock. I positioned the camera so that I could get some star reflections in the small—very small—pool of water. I also shot images without the water—just expanses of undulating red rock with alternating patterns of light and shadow.
Having finished that part of the show I had to wait until the Moon was at least a few degrees below the horizon allowing the sky to become very dark.
The Galactic Center of the Milky was about 16° above the horizon at moonset—which was just barely above the high point of Cathedral Rock. That wasn’t really the shot I wanted so I waited until it got higher.
Just before and after astronomical twilight the Galactic Center had risen to about 25° above the horizon. I shot a few images before twilight began to wash out the stars in the eastern sky. As a bonus, I was also able to capture the planets Venus and Mars just above the horizon.
The foreground images were shot at ISO 800, ƒ/5.6 and ƒ/8, and 120 seconds exposure with LENR (long exposure noise reduction) turned on. The star images were shot at ISO 800, ƒ/5.6, and 300 seconds exposure with LENR. Star images were taken with the camera mounted on an iOptron SkyTracker mount.
Most of my Milky Way photographs are shot using a wide-angle (24 or 28 mm focal length), or ultra-wide-angle lens (16 mm focal length). These create an image that shows a large portion of the Milky Way. But sometimes it’s fun to zoom in a bit and focus (no pun intended) on a much smaller section of the sky.
A few days after the full Moon provided a great opportunity to do this. The Moon would not rise until about an hour after astronomical twilight ended and, more importantly, there were very clear skies.
I used a Nikon D750 body with a Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens for this session. This is designed to be a portrait lens but I find it makes a pretty good astrophotography lens as well because of the excellent light-gathering f/1.8 aperture and the corner-to-corner sharpness resulting in nice round stars. At least, that is, when I get sharp focus and accurate tracking.
I shot 10 images of 120 seconds exposure time and used Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR). I was unable to use the 10th exposure because the sky was already getting brighter even though the Moon was still below the horizon. The result was 9×120 seconds or 18 minutes of light gathering.
I have several different applications (both Mac and Windows) for star stacking and alignment and chose to use Starry Sky Stacker this time with good results. Once I had the stack completed I used rnc-color-stretch for histogram stretching with final postprocessing done in Lightroom 6/Photoshop CS6.
This is the final result. I think the colors might be a bit too saturated—but I don’t dislike the result. Artistic license invoked here.