Even though the skies are fairly clouded today, every now and then the Sun pops through. So while capturing frames for the images below, I spend a fair amount of time waiting for the clouds to go home. After stacking and some sharpening, the images below came out. Focussing took a while, but eventually the sunspots came out nicely. 🙂
True color image of the Sun (as shot)
False color image of the Sun (because I like it)
It couldn’t have been longer than 5 minutes, but I got my best 2 shots of the Milky Way so far. With again just a camera and a tripod, focussing went quite smoothly and locating the Milky Way has become a fairly straightforward job by now. With ISO at 6400 (as sensitive as my camera gets) and exposure time at 20 seconds (maximum without visible trailing at 18mm), I barely had to do any post processing to get proper images.
Milky Way arm high in the Enschede sky with Vega in the top right. The open cluster M39 I imaged recently, is just left of star Deneb, which is the bright star a little to the lower left of the center of the image.
Milky Way reaching out of the Enschede skyglow with Altair as the brightest star in the center of this photo
JCdeBoer.com 