When the nuclear winter passes here I'll try & get some lens shots from the OLY 12&45 for you- had 50km/hr winds today, I nearly got knocked if my bike

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This site can be very helpful in knowing where to go to avoid light pollution.

Too bad it doesn't work for Australia

I shot this at Bryce canyon back in May. E-M5, Oly 9-18mm zoom.

The biggest issue I had was focusing in the dark. I had a friend shine a light on the rocks. Could barely see to focus.

Try 60 1 minute exposures and stack with Nebulosity I got good results at f8 with the small sensor on the Orion starshoot astro camera.

Way to much light polution where I live to do any basic astrophotography. I've thought about doing the barn door mount or clock drive my EQ mount, but I think the light pollution is still an issue. Those are some nice shots.

I'm really interested in this kind of photography. It's a hard thing to do. When I get a chance to get out to a non light polluted area again I have a much better idea how to approach it all. Here is one from my cabin area in Eastern Washington, just a single exposure.


Milky Way from my hillside by danska8, on Flickr

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While dark skies are preferred light pollution can be managed in many cases so might as well give it a shot. Generally speaking after flat field correction a moderatly simple gradient removal can clean up light pollution. There is a noise penalty but that is what frame stacking is for!

Also lunar and planetary work at higher magnifications are not so perturbed by light pollution as they are by atmospheric instabilities so you can also go that route.

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Some nice shots here... I tried doing star shots the other night and had a heck of a hard time getting it focused and/or getting anything interesting other than a black sky with dots. If anyone would like to share a basic primer on astrophotography I for one would be interested.

I'm not sure what you all mean about stacking exposures - I gather it's using an app to combine long exposure photos together, but I'm not familiar with the process and/or how it would differ from something like HDR (which I know from experience didn't work well with moon photos).


And Chris - are those moon shots through a scope? They look great, probably better than my very best shots with the 100-300 on a tripod so far

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“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” -- Dorothea Lange

You can download deep sky stacker for free which is the program F1L1P turned me onto. Basically you take identical, sequential exposures and then combine then to reduce the noise level (increase blacks) in your star-scapes.

After making a thread on here and then researching for a while on the internet I found that the key for great star shots is having the widest angle and aperture lens that you can get (in your case the 12/2). That way you can increase your exposure time for as long as possible without getting star trails (based on rule of 600; 600/Focal Length in FF terms, will give you the longest time you can expose without seeing trails).

Unless you can get to complete wilderness I think the stacking method seems like the only way to go. Timing the moon cycle and making sure it has been set for a while is also critical. I'm mainly interested in showing interesting foreground stuff with the Milky Way overhead so I'll be planning out some trips probably next summer to try and get some of these types of shots. I'm not sure how much of the Milky Way is really in view in the winter time.

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