Last night I attempted to get some photographs of the Milky Way. At midnight it should have been directly in front of me above the horizon looking east south east. At 11.45 p.m. what I saw was a wall of clouds rolling across the sky exactly where the view of the galaxy should have been.
Regardless I shot 80 RAW photographs with four different lenses and a variety of long exposure settings from 10 seconds up to 30 seconds. I then went to sleep.
Today we had a BBQ and as I was sitting in the garden this little Robin popped in to say hello and I got this shot which made me smile. My daughter Natalie had the idea to put out some water for the birds. It worked a treat.
Robin
Anyway I digress. Back to the night photography and those stars. When I looked at the results it was quite illuminating to note that all of the 'advice' videos that I had watched on #astrophotography were pretty useless for me.
The long exposure times that were suggested were all wrong. (for me) the high ISO was also wrong again for my circumstances.
My lighting and other conditions are totally different to what these other photographers were explaining and it made me think that putting in the details of each photo is fairly pointless because each persons environment is going to be totally different?
Anyhow here is what I shot last night.
The night sky looks like daylight? - This is normal btw
Same sky after a little processing
A slightly different angle and a little bit more processing gave this result
This last photo is the same image as the first photo above and shows many stars can be seen even through cloud
So what did I learn?
◘ Clouds are a pain but you can punch through them with long exposures.
◘ Not having ideal conditions doesn't mean that you cannot get something interesting.
◘ We have to experiment with our own equipment and test, test and test again. It is the only true way to improve....anything.
◘ Finally I learned that I need to know a lot more about how to process multiply shots of the same region of space.
Stack those images
Stacking. This is where you take several images of the same place and stack them using your computer and some software to blend them on top of each other to make a composite photo.
All of those magical photos that we see of the Milky Way are rarely a single shot but are compiled from many photos to bring out the fine detail of the Milky Way.
I'll be out there again in 5 minutes to try again. It's 11:59 p.m. and the Milky Way is waiting for me.
That's the joy of photography. Every day is a chance to get better photos.
My submission for #BeautifulSunday By 
