Oh how I love the Night Sky
// December 7th, 2009 // Blogs
I got home from Tesco earlier (yeah my life is full of excitement!) and happened to notice how fantastically, awesomely, amazingly clear the night sky was for once. Since living out here in the countryside I have generally managed to enjoy the stars so much more than ever before, its something that I find really humbling and really incredible at the same time.
Given the choice my bedroom ceiling would be crystal clear glass giving me a perfect view of the night – but alas such awesomeness isn’t really practical.
Anyway – as the sky is so very clear – I decided to try to take some photo’s with a few more than the usual 2 or 3 visible stars in.
Unfortunately the results looked much better on the low resolution camera screen than they do at full resolution. Due to the length of time I had to leave the shutter open they all blurred a small amount, and there was plenty of noise from the high ISO I used.
Nevertheless they are still some of the best pictures, at least most detailed pictures I have managed to take of the night sky. They don’t come close to how awe-inspiring it actually is stood there looking up, but they do serve as a helpful reminder to myself.
One day I do hope to get a proper astrophotography set together, a nice high powered telescope with automatic tracking and a decent mount for the DSLR, but I am afraid budget wise that will be a while away yet.
In the mean time here are 2 I took – if you look properly at the second picture you can see the whole of Orion which is one of my favourite constellations (generally because its easy to see and is so bright). Unfortunately I struggled to capture a lot of the bits I love the most (the smaller background stars/clusters and dusty bits – especially the band that shows the rest of the milky way itself).
