Southern Sky Milky Way

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Southern Sky Milky Way

[Public Domain] 18 May 2014 Dylan O'Donnell
CATEGORY : Astrophotography
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This is my very first photo ever of the milky way and though it is not perfect, I am pretty happy with how it turned out. It is a vertical panorama stitched from 11 photos, totalling about 20 million pixels after cropping. In order to draw out the colours I had to use 45 second exposures at 1600 ISO and the widest aperture my little kit lens could handle – f/3.5. Normally this would cause the stars to trail and streak as they move across the sky, but my camera was mounted to a Celestron 4SE telescope which was tracking the movement of the stars, allowing the Nikon D5100 to do exposures of any length while keeping the stars as sharp pin points. This is definitely my most technical photo so far, but what a beautiful spiral galaxy we live in!

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