This wide-field image of the Milkyway Cygnus area was taken with a Canon D60 digital SLR mounted piggy-back atop an 8" Mak-Newt. This is from a single 300 second, ISO100 shot taken through a 20mm Sigma lens operating at f/1.8.
Despite the excellent tracking of the Astro-Physics AP900GTO mount, my failure to ensure orthogonality (squaring) of the camera to the mount produced less than "stellar" results (Ooops!), but pleasing non-the-less... every session is a learning experience (and usually a real hoot!)
If you are rubbing your eyes and puzzling over the placement of the stars that appear contained within the trees, don't be... there is a simple explanation for their presence: the camera was locked on their paths, tracking them continuously through open parts of the trees. Their light was already fixed in place on the image as the trees "moved" into the frame during the exposure, partially reducing the intensity of the background sky in those places.
Processing was done in Images Plus, and primarily consisted of background/contrast "stretching", a mild amount of multi-resolution "smoothing", and restoration using a tad of Richardson-Lucy deconvolution.
The "uncut" section referenced by the inset below shows the level of detail that was present in the original 3072x2048 pixel shot (the JPEG compression diminishes the clarity, but you get the idea). |
