180° Milky Way Panorama - a photo on Flickriver

            The southern sky is a truly wonder for our eyes: it shows dense and bright regions of the Milky Way which remain almost invisible from the European latitudes. For example, the galactic bulge (Sagittarius Constellation) in the southern hemisphere reveals its beauty since it culminates at 90° overhead, as it is the case in Chile!
In June 2018, during the first overnight of my life, I took refuge in a clear spot within the Chilean Andes (Coquimbo Region), at 1400 meters altitude. The atmosphere was particularly memorable: the milky way spread out over my head and illuminated the surrounding landscape, added with a deadly deep silence.

I took the benefit from having my camera set up on my tracking mount to try some horizon-to-horizon panoramic view.
The principle is based on capturing a strip of images from an horizon to the opposite one (180° field of view). Such a panorama is pretty tough (for me at least) because doing some panning (translation motion) with a ball-head attached to an equatorial mount is a real challenge!
It amounts to doing azimuth-altitude motions using a mount where you could only do right-Ascension / Declination motions: in other words, it is a shift between two different coordinate systems = not an easy task.

The outcome you should obtain doing a horizon-to-horizon panorama is a vertical strip parallel to the Milky Way itself! In this image, I would say that I partially failed. The framing of the Milky Way is a bit too narrow and not centered.

However I was pleased by the rendering quality. Note the total resolution of this image is 44 Megapixels (not visible on this version)   

TECHNICAL DETAILS 
📷 Canon Rebel T5i + Sigma Art 18-35mm f/1.8 lens + Star Adventurer Mini tracking mount
→ 7 stitched pictures taken in landscape mode
→ Single 30 seconds exposure
→ ISO 3200
→ 18 mm
→ f/1.8
Softwares: Dxo Optics pro 9 for noise reduction / Lightroom for all the edits / Microsoft ICE for the final stitching.
   

Taken on: June 17, 2018

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astronomy

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sigma 18-35 mm

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centre de la voie lactée

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