Last night I took some more photos of the night sky trying to get an image of the Milky Way. I then spent many happy hours trying to get a piece of software to blend them together. Failed several times and ended up merging them myself using Photoshop.
This is the result below. There was some cloud again last night but as I mentioned before with long exposures the star light still comes through bright and clear. Shining brightly was Deneb so I was pointing the camera in the right direction.
This is the part of the Cygnus constellation which is part of the Milky Way. The bright star in the top middle is Deneb. (Alpha Cygni or Arided) It is a supergiant star.
Hundreds of time bigger than our Sun it is 38.8 AU (Astronomical units) away from us. That's 3.5323207 x 10 to the 9 Miles. Travelling at the speed of light (186,282 per second) It would take 2,600 years to reach Deneb.
It's full of stars
I uploaded the image to Astrometry to get the details of what I had captured and this was the result.
Deneb in the Milky Way
For those of you with a technical interest here are the results of the star field search conducted by the Astrometry software.
B = 0 0 5.437e-07
0 1.0552e-06
-2.4501e-07
AP = -0.00078249 5.6096e-06 -5.752e-07
1.4023e-05 -3.9916e-07
-1.0791e-06
BP = -0.00072359 7.2825e-06 -5.4331e-07
-1.595e-06 -1.0548e-06
2.4517e-07
sqrt(det(CD))=16.4639 [arcsec]
Found tag-along columns from field: FLUX BACKGROUND
Field 1: solved with index index-217.fits.
Field 1: tried 566 quads, matched 6200 codes.
Spent 2.052 s user, 0.38 s system, 2.432 s total, 2.43232 s wall time.
Writing 26 rows (of 4971 field and 27 index objects) to correspondence file.
cx<=dx constraints: 0
meanx constraints: 2482
RA,Dec constraints: 0
AB scale constraints: 0
Spent 2.44821 seconds on this field.
Where is Deneb now?
Having seen the details of my photos. I wondered where that particular constelation was right now on the galactic plain.
Using the American Astronomical Society Worldwide telescope I found my photo up there amongst the stars. Which was pretty cool. I must admit.
This image above is of my photo of the Cygnes constellation mapped onto the current night sky. It's cloudy again tonight but I'll have another go at capturing the whole Milky Way as it is pretty spectacular if you get it right now as it forms an arc across the whole of the eastern horizon.
Now that would be a shot.