2. Night Sky

Sky at Night

Look into the night sky and you look back in time. The sky at night is a vastness beyond comprehension, full of celestial objects like galaxies, stars, planets and the Moon. Gaze into a clear night sky and you get drawn into another world, a world as it was in the past. In this collection I am sharing my favourite night sky images and collections. All have been photographed in a natural environment and are real images. Many of my images tell a story, whether the subject matter or process of composition.
All photos captured with OM System.
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    StarTrail from 17/18 July 2013. Very pleased with this shot as it was the first real lengthy trail I have managed to capture with the OM-D. New moon phase (almost) and clear skies all night allowed a good opportunity. Captured with the Oly OM-D & 12mm. I set the camera low on tripod at 2300hrs and on 10s exposures, F2, ISO 250 shot continuous until 0400 the next morning. There is about 4-5 hrs worth of exposures in this shot. The trees in foreground were lit with a few flash bursts. Framed around Polaris (north star) to get the nice swirly effect. Great depth from this 12mm prime lens. It is superb for low light work. The final multi thousand exposure was put together in StarStax software.
    19 July 2013 waxing moon. Captured with Olympus OM-D & 75-300mm lens at full focal length. The technical facilities of this camera bring smartphone technology together with dslr. F6.7 (max) @ 1/250s and ISO 200. Focusing was as simple as touching the lcd on the appropriate moon crater and hitting the shutter release. Whilst a relatively slow lens (f4.8 at best) the sharpness of the moon is the best I have achieved & surpassed the E5 & 90-250mm. Btw thats a £5k lens....
    Startrail from the evening/morning of 17/18 July 2013. My first low light shot with the newest member of the Olympus family, the OM-D. Using the ultra low light capable 12mm f2.0 lens. Star trails are quite tricky in summertime because of the modest ambient light levels associated with long days and short nights so the window of darkness is limited to approx 2300 - 0300hrs. I set the OM-D on a tripod at 2300hrs pointing due north and framed just below the celestial north star (polaris). This would ensure a nice circular trail. Using the remote cable RM-UC1 set to continuous I set exposure times to 10s and ISO 250. The same shoot with the E5 would have allowed me 15s @ ISO 500 or 640, but with the OM-D (and fast 12mm lens) longer exposure times or higher ISO was overexposing the bright summer night sky. When shooting in continuous mode with the OM-D ensure you switch off the lcd or it remains on all the time , which drain battery. To add a bit of foreground lighting I shot a few bursts of remote flash across the grass just after the camera was shooting. I then waited till the early hours to retrieve camera. It is possible to shoot in fine jpeg mode but the larger the file, the slower each image write/save time (tiny gaps in the trail arc lines). Medium jpeg setting will suffice. After importing the 1400 or so images from camera to MAC I then ran them all through stacking software (StarStax - freeware) which produces the final composite that you see. A lovely example of Earths rotation seen through the night sky/stars. I was lucky to capture an Iridium Flare in the frame too :-) A single BLN-1 battery was good for 4 hrs too, which was very impressive. Also with the summer heatwave there is no problems with dew at moment. Happy OM-D days. Very impressed with the low light results of the camera. Noise tolerance is excellent (way better than E5) - thank you Mr nice new TruePic V1 processing engine (E5 has TruePic V+).