MilkyWay wide field – from Lagoon and Trifid to North America

About the Object

The Venus Optics or Laowa 15mm is a nice wide angle lens for landscape photography. 15mm is roughly as low as one can go before getting fish-eye vision. For astro it is interesting owing to its f=2 focal ratio, but the image quality outside of APS-C quickly deteriorates (well, this is also really pushing the optics ...).  One the other hand side, the Milky Way "cries" for wide angle, in particular when traveling in desert climates like Arizona or the Chilean Atacama. Traveling light, I only had a tripod, so the image is a stack of 78 exposures at 16 sec each.

Observation Notes

Image processing was quite challenge. BXT2.0 impresses with cleaning out the stellar distortions in the outskirts (though it cannot do magic) making the usable range much larger. plate solving is of considerable effort, even the new PI image solver does not like it at al - at the end I was manually aligning against Gaia DR3 (Gaia is magic!).

Data were taken on 2023 October 12.

Technical Details

View the full-resolution image together with complete acquisition and processing details on AstroBin.