Wide Field


Perseus Wide Field

The large and bright objects (Pleiades, California Nebula, and several star clusters) and lower star density make this wide-field image work fairly well. Compare it with the Cygnus Wide image. If you can make out the brighter stars the whole constellation of Perseus is shown here. M45 (the Pleiades) is in the upper right corner and the red swath near the center is the California Nebula. The image was captured at the 2011 Oregon Star Party as a test of the Nikkor lens for astro photography (along with the Cygnus Wide image). Although it’s a pretty good lens, it is […]


Cygnus Wide Field

While shooting “deep sky” objects with the telescope at the 2011 Oregon Star Party, I had a second rig set up to shoot wide areas of the sky with a 35mm lens on a DSLR camera. It didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. I think the main problem is that with such a dense field of stars you need higher resolution to avoid becoming just a gray area. I did several such shots and this is probably the best one because it includes a lot of hydrogen nebulous regions (the red). If you know where to look, […]