Night Shots, Space Objects and Having Fun with 600mm Lens
Last week, when I went on a hunt for a comet that I wanted to capture, I accomplished this mission, as you saw in one of my recent posts. I also took some other photos of the night sky and what I could find there that night. I had lent the 600mm lens that I used to capture the comment and wanted to use and test the length of it on other objects too.
It was a dark area I went to, just outside the biggest light-polluted area near the bigger cities. This meant I was able to see a lot of stars in the sky and the Milky Way was also well visible. Here I have some shots taken over the field with my wide(24mm) lens to capture as much sky and landscape as I could.
I parked the car in the middle of the road like that because I used it as a wind block when I was photographing the comet, so the camera wouldn't shake in the wind gusts. There was no traffic at all on this gravel road, so it was fine.
You can see the red hue. It's the lights of a high mast next to me. I didn't see the red light with my own eyes, but the camera picked it up.
This is taken in the direction right above me, into the Milky Way. Countless amounts of stars.
Even though this is a dark area, there is still some light pollution from a nearby town and Helsinki, about 80km away. At first, I didn't like the color my camera captured, but I actually liked it after. It's like an apocalyptic green/yellowish hue in this direction.
You can see the Pleiades star cluster in the photo above, in the upper right corner. I took out the 600mm lens and took a shot as close as I could. I didn't realise at the time, but the photo was kinda blurry. The camera got shaken in the wind.
The top of the mast. This is not a cropped photo. This is as close as I can get with a 600mm lens. The above photo of the mast was taken with a 24mm lens.
I attempted to take a photo of the Andromeda galaxy. Several years ago, I got a photo where I could even make out the texture of the galaxy, but this was a stacked photo of about 100 shots. Here is only a single frame taken with a 600mm focal length. Andromeda is our neighboring galaxy, about 2.5 million light-years from us.
This was all I could find that night to take photos of. I hoped to find the Orion Nebula too, but unfortunately, it wasn't visible for me then.
Astronomy rocks! Unfortunately, I live in a place that is under cloud for most of the year and polluted with light, so it's not conducive to starry exploration. I like that one can have a deeper connection to the universe through the lens.
Same here. Most of the time is cloudy, especially this time of the year. Some light pollution is almos everywhere but we do have a couple of very dark spots here in Estonia. In this case, it was about 60% dark sky.
Great to see that you were able to get these shots. Hopefully, you'll have many more clear skies ahead.
That sounds like an amazing night, Using a 600mm lens to capture the stars and the Milky Way must have been such a cool experience. Even with the wind, those shots must have turned out incredible.
Been photographing night sky for a long time, never gets old!
Using the car as a wind blo;ck was such a smart move. Wind can ruin a long lens in seconds. The way you leaned into that apocalyptic green/yellow cast and made it a mood really works for me.. defintely feels like a story rather than a flaw. And that single frame Andromeda made me smile, stacking is like compounding for photons, little gains adding up over time :)
I thought about removing this apocalyptic tone in the beginning, but didn't. I like it too haha. Wish I had a telescope for deep sky objects tho.
yeah, good call keeping that tone, it adds drama and and makes the scene feel alive :) You dont need a big scope right away, a star tracker plus stacking with that 600 can pull out nebulae and more detail. If you want glass, a small 72ED refractor or a 130PDS newtonian is cheapish and friendly to learn. What are you leaning toward, tracker or small refractor?