Starry Starry Night

On my recent trip to the Cederberg I planned to try out some astrophotography. This is something I'm very unfamiliar with, and have never tried before. The landscape of the Cederberg is a series of strange rock formations formed over millions of years by the battering winds. One of the most distinctive features of the Cederberg is the Wolfberg Arch, a 30 meter (100ft) high rock wall, with a massive hole straight through the middle.

With this as a subject I experimented with star photography. With essentially one hour to snap away before the moon came up I decided I would try some deep-space photography, as star-trail photography would just be too time consuming. It was a challenge finding the correct settings to get enough light with as little star-trail as possible and as little noise as possible. With my Canon 50D and Sigma 10-20 lens I ended up getting this shot on a 78 second bulb release, at f/5 with an ISO of 1600. I then post-processed it in Photoshop in order to bring out the light of the Milky Way. For those interested I followed an excellent YouTube tutorial by Kenneth Brandon on how to post-process Milky Way shots.

This was a fun experiment, and something I'm sure in time I'll improve on, but for the moment I'm very happy with the result.

I hope you enjoy it!

And please feel free to comment on this and any other of my posts and pictures.

Wolfberg Arch and Milky Way