Solitude Among the Trees
A quick time-lapse of the Milky Way using a kit camera and DSLR mounted on a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer pro
I had an opportunity to take this shot as I sat below the evergreens, along a rocky coastline. I managed to capture some other astro targets along the way but listening to the water lap against the rocks all night was worth the price of admission alone!
The target is our own Milky Way galaxy and while there are plenty of more impressive shots out there, I really like how this composition turned out. The city glow in the distance is probably the one time where light pollution worked out in my favor; I just love the orange contrast it provides!
For full disclosure, I did add the star spikes in post processing. I couldn’t resist and I think they are super cool in the right context (even if it is artificial)! This can be done manually in a tool like Photoshop or by using a third-party plugin.
Diffraction spikes are a physical phenomenon that happens when light gets diffracted by the supports holding the secondary mirror in a reflecting telescope or the blades of your camera aperture.
There’s some really neat physics that happens here but that’s a little outside the scope of this article <insert cheesy grin here lol>. Suffice it to say that depending on the shape of your aperture or number of supports your telescope has, you will get a different diffraction pattern on your stars!
In fact, this is the reason the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) shows diffraction patterns with four spikes and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with six! You can see examples of this from NASA here and more from the JWST here.