The Burning Range
In the distance, the Stirling Range National Park in Western Australia lies under the Milky Way cores as it slowly rises above the hills and mountains. The bright Lagoon Nebula shines like a big, celestial eye - looking almost directly down onto Bluff Knoll, and the recently cropped fields below glow faintly from the 26% moon lighting the landscape from behind the camera.
To produce this image I went for my Canon 85mm f/1.2 camera lens which nicely frames the core of the Milky Way. Its a sharp lens but does suffer a fair bit of chromatic abberation, even stopped down to f/2.8. I did originally shoot 18 frames to stitch into a larger picture but ended up cropping down to this field of view, about 3 frames worth. All shots were taken one immediately after the other with all camera settings kept the same between frames. Details are summarised below. I used PTGui to stich the frames and Photoshop for processing.
| IMG_2721 | 2022-05-06 | North of Stirling Range National Park, Western Australia | EOS6D modified | Canon 85mm f1.2 lens | @f/2.8 | Baadar UV/IR cut-filter | ISO1600 | 30s | 18 x panels (but cropped) | Skywatcher StarAdventurer mount |
