Astrophotography

I went out with four other fellow Macarthur Photographic Society members to Belangalo State Forest with the Macarthur Astronomical Society who hosted us on Saturday night.

It was a "New Moon" night, so very dark.

Thanks very much to Tony Law and Chris Malikoff and the team from the Macarthur Astronomical Society for a great night.

The weather Gods were kind up to a point for us.

We had cloudless skies which showed off the Milky Way in all of it's magnificence. The only problem was the dew point. It was very "dewy", the lens was very wet and my lens was fogging up continuously.

You will see this in some of the images with the halos around the brighter spots.

I was shooting with my Pentax K1 Mk11, with a 15-30mm Pentax lens. All of my images that I will show were shot at 15mm, iso 1600 and f2.8. The only change was with the shutter speed. My shutter speed went from 30s to 300s.

The Pentax K1 has a Astrotracing setting where you can get up to 300s without star trails. So I tested that out.

You can definitely see star trails at 300s, but the faster shutter speeds were pretty good.