Deep Space

Lagoon and Trifed Nebula.

I began by shooting the fading rays of the sun though a space between two large rocks(I later used that as a foreground for star trails) setting my lens at f/8 for a long depth of field. Then I moved on to shot the Milky Way with large rock to the east as a foreground element. All of my shots were coming out underexposed, even at ISO 6400 where I could get a good exposure at ISO 400 or 800. So I shot 50 exposures and then went on to shot the foreground shot with light painting. The lens I was using is a third party lens, so the f-stop doesn't appear on the camera's screen, I was still shooting at f/8. I set up the sky tracker and began polar sighting it. The problem with polar sighting is that Polaris isn't all that bright and is a bit difficult to distinguish from it's neighboring stars. Fortunately, I could see a plane passing by Polaris and then could see it on the sky tracker's scope and sighted the sky tracker. I put on the 50-200mm lens and focused, my first target was the Lagoon Nebula that's right in the center of the Milky Way. Here we see the Lagoon Nebula with the Trifed Nebula to above and to the right.