Posted August 26th, 2012

Tenting Under The Milky Way

I just returned from a motorcycle trip to British Columbia’s Okanagan region where I went to visit with relatives. I camped along the way and I had little other than clear skies for the return leg. With a new moon, that provided perfect conditions to photograph the stars at the Crooked River provincial campground 70 kms north of Prince George, well away from any significant artificial light pollution. The bright band of the Milky Way appears in the northern hemisphere during the summer months but we do not see the best of it at these latitudes and the lack of complete darkness for much of the season further conspires against viewing and photographing it, at least at my home in the Yukon. However, on this night at this location it was visible to the naked eye and the light gathering capability of a digital sensor served to enhance it nicely. A small flashlight in the tent provided sufficiently low lighting to not overexpose during the long exposure at wide aperture required to capture the stars in the same shot. Actually though, while it looked good on review in the LCD in the darkness, the sky did end up poorly exposed and I had to boost its brightness considerably in software. This could have created an unusably noisy image with poor detail including failure of dimmer stars to be recorded but the great low light performance of the Pentax K-5 shone through. At the wide 17mm focal length, rotation of the earth should be only a minor issue in a 45 second exposure but I used the astrotracer mode of my camera-plus-GPS to ensure there was no streaking of the stars which I figured would be more distracting than the slight blurring of the trees and tent that resulted from this choice.
Pentax K-5, Tamron AF 17-50mm f/2.8 XR Di-II LD @ 17mm, 45sec @ f/2.8, ISO 560, Pentax O-GPS1