Shooting the Milky Way at Moraine State Park
The Milky Way over Moraine State Park
A clear night in Western Pennsylvania is an exceedingly rare event, so I loaded my camera gear into the car and drove up to Moraine State Park on Friday evening with the intention of shooting some wide field Milky Way images.
Setup on the south shore
I setup in the parking lot of Moraine's South Shore facing North (trying to avoid the minimal amount of light pollution from Pittsburgh/Cranberry in the South). My shooting partner immediately started calling out shooting stars while I was focused on getting my gear unpacked and ready to go...I must have missed 10-12 of them that night! The weather was perfect for viewing the stars...temperature in the low 50's, dewpoints in the upper 40's, and not a wisp of cloud in the sky. The location I was shooting from is a Class 4 Bortle site, and we were able to plainly make out the Milky Way with just our eyes.
The light pollution situation
Once the camera was setup and oriented correctly, I slung the battery from the tripod and connected my lens heater to ensure that I didn't have any dew form on my lens in the cool evening air. After that, the only thing left to do was focus (no easy task with my current lens) and setup the intervalometer. At the focal length I was shooting at, any exposure longer than 5 seconds would result in star trails in the image, so I ended up taking 412 5-second exposures at f/2.4 ISO6400. Once those images were captured, I popped the lens cap back on to take some dark frames (this helps reduce the overall noise in the finished image). After that, we packed up for the night and headed home!
The following morning I stacked all 412 exposures and the dark frames in Sequator, and it aligned each image so that the light/color data contained in each image was summed together to give me a much more detailed image of the Milky Way. Editing the image in Photoshop allows me to bring out the full range of color/light that you see in the image above and reveal the North American and Pelican Nebulae within the core of the Milky Way. I am blown away by the level of detail you’re able to capture in the night sky with just a DSLR. I’m planning on purchasing a star tracking mount for my camera this winter that will allow me to take much longer exposures (in the range of 2-3 minutes instead of 5 seconds). I can’t wait to see what I can do with data like that!
