On summer nights the Milky Way, our home galaxy, arches high in the sky from south to north. Summer is when we're looking inward toward the central portion of the galaxy, while in winter we look outward.
My telesope's field of view is too narrow to capture the entire Milky Way, so I mounted a camera with a 170° wide-angle lens on a bracket to fit the open observatory roof, and set it up there. The tree line defines my local horizon – generally about 30° – but slightly lower toward the south (bottom of image). Sadly, even with that lower horizon, trees obscure the galaxy center.
This is a stack of 27 15-second exposures. South is at the bottom. It's obvious that my sky is only moderately dark, with low-elevation light pollution in all dirctions except southwest.
| Exposure |
• Twenty-seven 15-second exposures made with FireCapture @ 27°C ambient temperature, camera gain: 430
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| Processing |
• Save movie frames as PNG images using SER Player
• With PixInsight: ☞ Calibrate, star-align, and integrate PNG frames • Noise reduction and detail recovery in Topaz DeNoise AI • Final tweaking in Photoshop CS6 |
| Date and Location |
• August 5, 2021 • Louisa County, Virginia, USA |
|
Equipment |
• ASI-178MC color camera with 170° fish-eye lens |
Updated May 23, 2023