A 360° x 220° fish-eye panorama of the southern night sky, showing the Milky Way all the way across the sky with the centre of the Galaxy directly overhead. The Dark Emu extends from the Coal Sack at upper left to the dark lanes in Scutum at lower right. Venus is rising at right amid the zodical light and some cloud. Mars, at opposition, is just setting behind the trees at left. I shot this at 4:30 a.m. April 11, 2014 from the Two Styx Cabins just outside the boundary of New England National Park, NSW, Australia. This is a stitched panorama composed of 6 segments, each taken with an 8mm fish-eye lens on the Canon 5D Mark II. So while one image with this lens aimed straight up would have recorded a similar scene. taking a panorama of 6 images, at 60° spacings, and stitching them allows the image to extend below the horizon to take in more of the ground, creating a scene that takes in a full 360° in azimuth but more than 180° in altitude. Each segment is a 1-minute untracked exposure at f/3.5 and ISO 4000. So the stars are slightly trailed. The images were stitched in PTGui using the spherical projection mode. Finishing was in Photoshop.
A 360° panorama of the upper field of the Texas Star Party at the Prde Ranch near Fort Davis, TX, May 13, 2015, taken in deep twilight. The panorama shows the field of telescopes and observers getting ready for the night of deep-sky viewing and imaging. Venus is the bright object at right of centre and Jupiter is above it. The Zodiacal Light stretches up from the horizon and continues left across the sky in the Zodiacal Band to brighten in the east (left of centre) as the Gegeneschein. I shot this with a 14mm lens, oriented vertically, with each segment 40 seconds at f/2.8 and with the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 3200. The panorama is made of 8 segements at 45° spacings. The segments were stitched with PTGui software.
