On my recent visit to Vienne I monumentally failed to get my telescope setup working properly - getting it aligned to Polaris was the problem, plus being there around the Summer Solstice meant that it didn’t get properly dark until almost midnight by which time I was yawning and not fully motivated…
However I did manage to get a reasonable timelapse of the Milky Way, using my Fujifilm X-H2 and a Samyang 12mm lens, with the camera attached to an Ecoflow powerbank so it could shoot 20 second exposures all night unattended.
Again the short night worked against me a bit as the sun came up and got in the way just as the galactic core was getting to the middle of my frame!
Thank you - I have an app on my phone called “Stellarium” which shows me the night sky and also sunrise and sunset, but I hadn’t twigged quite how few hours I had to work with.
Also the first night I tried to shoot the timelapse the b### Moon popped up halfway through!
Depends where you are! A lot of the posh sky timelapses are done by people who live in places with a dry climate and very little light pollution, such as Arizona, Utah, or Australia!
Northern Europe it’s much more hit and miss. Frustratingly the recent canicule has meant a succession of clear nights, but as already mentioned not much actual darkness!
The moon does get out of the way for about half the month, but you have to plan for that.
Very nice and concise. Some astronomy things to go on.
I bought a telescope for my terrace some years back. Spent ages looking at the moon and various others, but gave up when I could not find anyone to wave back at me.
Depends how far south you are. For us it was about 3.5 hours of ‘astro dark’ I think and quite a bit more for normal ‘night’. Tonight, we have 4 hours 35 minutes of astro dark. If I look at a random location near Birmingham it shows about 1 hour less than that tonight.
That’s really good and shows what can be done with a decent camera with the correct lens. I’ve wanted to do this for a while but couldn’t really justify the cost of a 12mm F/2 lens and an adaptor for my astro camera just to do piccies of the milky way.
The Samyang 12mm F2 that I use is a manual lens (no need for AF with astrophotography, and even with “normal” picture-taking it’s hardly necessary with such a wide angle due to its inherent high depth of field). It costs about £228 on Amazon and comes in several different camera fittings so you might not need an adaptor.
Alternatively TT Artisans do a similar manual 12mm f2.8 for £149!
BTW don’t get a “fisheye” lens as its distortion is to much - you want a “rectilinear” wide angle.
I use the 12mm quite a lot for events where I want to show the environment:
Or get a copy of Hugin and it will convert between the two (that said Hugin is hugely capable, but I’ve never quite managed to get it to do exactly what I want).
So, 19mm full-frame equivalent - maybe a bit long for a fisheye in any case.
Yes you can “defish” fisheye images but there is always a loss of quality in doing so. Better to have a rectilinear lens to start with, unless you are a mega fan of the fisheye look (I am not!)
I do own a fisheye (Samyang 8mm) which I bought as an experiment for wedding dancing images after I saw a colleague using one, but I never really liked it.
Fortunately it was cheap. I may find a use for it one day…
Yes - 12mm on APS-C cameras comes out at 18mm full-frame equivalent FWIW.
