[Leica] Photographing the Milky Way

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard Ritter)]

On Jun 22, 2011, at 9:02 PM, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:

> Michiel is right. The Milky Way is a band of stars stretching across the
> sky, visible only under extremely dark conditions. 

Not necessarily. It's visible from the moderately deep suburbs, especially 
in the summer, when it's overhead at midnight during the summer in 
mid-northern latitudes. Of course, it's GLORIOUS only from really dark-sky 
locations. Like intermountain Colorado, where I'm headed with my cameras and 
telescopes next week to do deep-sky work at the Rocky Mountain Star Stare 
(www.rmss.org).

> On a practical note, if you are in the right location and you want your
> camera to image individual stars rather than a smudge of light, you will
> need to have your camera on an equatorial mount that compensates for the
> rotation of the Earth. Exposures will be long. Any foreground object, 
> trees,
> houses, etc. must be unmoving.

> Larry Z (a former astrophysics major)

Again, not necessarily. This was pretty much true when I first pointed a 
camera at the sky in 1959, but not now, especially with a DSLR like the 
D700, which gives good results even at ISO 6400. Check out the image of the 
Milky Way I took at Jackson Hole two years ago with mine. The text shows how 
simple the process can be. If I had used a better lens, like the new 24mm 
f/1.4 prime (which I've just acquired and will be taking with me this year, 
and the 35 and 50 primes stopped down to 2.8 or so should do even better), 
the star images would have been much sharper toward the edges and the 
exposure could have been half as long: 
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Wyoming_001/Wyoming/Wyoming+Milky+Way.jpg.html

OTOH, it is true that better results can be gotten with a simple tracker, 
which allows longer exposures at less than full aperture and at lower ISOs. 
The premier commercial product is shown here (again, I'm taking mine out 
West this year): http://www.astrotrac.com/, but a serviceable "barn door" 
tracker can be made from two pieces of plywood, a hinge, a nut and bolt, and 
a 1-rpm  synchronous motor.

I'll post some images from Colorado with one of the 1.4 primes and the 
Astrotrac next month.

?howard (who would have been an astrophysicist had calculus come to me as 
easy as biology)