June 2018 and a holiday spent in the little French Village of St Etoile-Cyrice in the Hautes-Alpes region of France. Holiday opportunities don’t come very often and when you get the chance to visit an astronomy themed residence that has several observatories dotted around then for an astronomy enthusiast you are pretty much in heaven. The sky, even in the middle of summer and fast approaching the longest day of the year, proved to be inky black and the stars shone and the Milky Way stood out the clearest I have ever seen it before. Located lower at a lattitude of 44 degrees we were blessed with a whopping 10 degrees view further south down the celestial globe which meant that we could image the galactic centre of our galaxy easily.
The FUJI XT-1 was of course the camera of choice for the entire holiday for both day and night, being compact I didn’t have to worry about it when travelling. I took several images of the Milky Way – both using the 14mm f/2 and the 35mm f2 lens. The 14mm giving a wider field of view and under short exposures we were collecting photons from the Milky Way and getting exceptionally impressive images with just 10 seconds of exposure. The real result started though once I put the 35mm lens on and started to track using the star adventurer. ensuring stars were not trailing and having the ability to lower the ISO to 400 meant that I could easily control the noise in the images. A 2 minute exposure tracked, at f2.0 and ISO 400 and I got an image that I am very pleased with. I have been obsessed with wanting to image this part of the sky, as we don’t have that privilege in the UK and it is full of amazing Deep sky objects.
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