wide field

More 6D Wide-Field Shots

 in Blog  tagged canon 6d / Dark Horse / Milky Way / wide field

Eventually, I’ll have to get serious about using the Canon 6D for astro-photography.  Specifically, I’ve only done exposures up to 30 seconds, the maximum the camera will do by itself (without a computer or other device controlling the camera).  The results have been mixed (I’m only showing you the ones that worked out well), but with longer exposures and lower ISO settings I think it can produce some spectacular results, both with wide angle lenses and telescopes. But until then (and “then” could be a while, given the usual weather patterns here this time of year), I’ll share a couple […]

Cygnus Wide Field

 in Blog  tagged canon 6d / cygnus / wide field

I mentioned in a previous post that I still had some unprocessed images from last Summer.  Honestly, I still haven’t had a chance to do much with them, but here is one example, a wide field shot of the center of the constellation Cygnus.  This was captured with a Canon 6D full-frame DSLR, with an 85mm f/1.8 lens.  It consists of just 8 frames of 30 seconds each (at ISO 6400).  The camera was modified for Hydrogen-alpha sensitivity, which is why we can see an abundance of red.  The brown regions are primarily dust and the grey is just a […]

Perseus Wide Field

 in Gallery / Wide Field  tagged perseus / photography / 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

 in Gallery / Wide Field  tagged cygnus / photography / 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, […]