Date/Time
Start: Sep 16 2012 9:30PM
Finish: 11:30PM

Location: Cowichan River Provincial Park, meadow between Stolz Pool campsite & river, near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada

Observers: none

Tonight, my mission is to take a wide field of the Milky Way horizon to horizon from the meadow behind our campsite. There are some tall trees, but as I setup in the spot I picked out this afternoon, I can see Sagittarius to Cassiopeia, but the Cassiopeia stars are still behind a tall tree to the north (left side of photo). I'm shoot such a wide field-of-view, there is image smearing around the whole horizon in the resultant image. The Milky Way is gorgeous, and my test exposure tells me there is very little light pollution at this spot, except some glow from Duncan (green on right side of photo).

Equipment: Hutech-modified Canon T2i dSLR and Canon EF8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM lens (operating at 10mm) mounted on an Astrotrac tracking EQ mount & Manfrotto 055 tripod.

Exposures: 98x1min at f/5.0 ISO 1600

Conditions: Temperature 7.5°C, Humidity 75%, Dew Point 11.7 (no dew). LVM 4.2, Transparency 5/5, Steadiness 5/5, clear sky, with Milky Way clearly visible.

Processing:

ImagesPlus 4.25 x64: Auto DSLR Image Set Processing - Bayer at Capture WB, Normalize, Grade, Align, Combine (Excluded Min/Max Average). 38 final frames used. Generate 16 bit TIF for further processing.

Lightroom 4: Crop and rotate, warm tint to deal with green and enhance Sagittarius' emission clouds, apply Clarity to brighten image and give it some snap. Reduce colour depth, annotate, export jpg versions.