Milky Way over the Woolshed

This image is composed of a mosaic of 21 sub-images, taken at a chilly 5am on the 24^th February while we were staying at The Woolshed at Pike River (a tiny rural settlement near Lyrup in the Riverlands region of South Australia).

We mounted Tanya’s super-duper camera onto the back of the telescope so that we could slew it across the night sky and capture the whole Milky Way sweeping from one horizon to the other, together with the moon, which was just rising.  We then used some clever software from Microsoft to automatically stitch the 21 exposures together. Later, Tanya used Lightroom tools to improve the clarity and tone of the composite image.

For the mosaic, we chose a perspective that kept the building ‘straight’, although this is actually nearly a 180 degree sweep of the sky and the Milky Way was actually curving from horizon to horizon.

Click the image or here for a hi-res version.