Choosing What is Most Important

Bonding with my grandsons under a starry night sky: Recently, I was prepping for a private workshop, when I got a call from two of my grandsons, who wanted to learn astrophotography.

This was a very inconvenient time for me; however, opportunities to connect with your grandchildren don’t come around every day, so I dropped what I was doing and took them to a dark sky location near an alpine wilderness lake (10,500 feet or 3,200 m).

The above photo is the only image I took that night (a single exposure), just to show them a possible composition for their cameras, and what the Milky Way should look like. The blown out area on the right was one of them going back to their car to get a forgotten item. The rest of the night (three more hours) was spent helping them take their photos.

THEIR PHOTOS...

Jared, who is actually my grandson-in-law, took this photo with his wife's Canon R6 camera and a RF35mm f/1.8 Macro IS STM lens — a super sharp lens for shooting bridal rings (she's a beginning wedding photographer), but it is definitely not corrected for coma aberration to the stars, as you can see in the enlargement below. Still, he was very happy with his first ever nightscape. He spent the rest of the evening doing a long exposure star trail on film, using an old Canon EOS-3 (the film has yet to be developed).

Jacob shot with his own camera, a used Canon Rebel T5i (Canon EOS 700D). I lent to him my Rokinon 12mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens, which on his APS-C cropped sensor, effectively crops a 19mm lens' angle of view. That crop also eliminates a lot of the fisheye's barrel distortion.

While the Rokinon is well corrected for coma aberration to the stars, the 12-year old Canon Rebel T5i was not designed to be a "nightscape" camera. At ISO 6400, the noise level is awful. Even with a 10-exposure stack, and additional noise reduction (and sharpening) via Topaz AI, the Rebel had trouble handling the noise, which deteriorates image detail. However, it did a great job recording the one-hour star trail exposure at ISO 200, using the Long Exposure Noise Reduction (LENR) mode method described on page 174 of my Milkyway NightScapes ebook (see the enlarged comparison, below.)

Which do you like best, the "points of light" shot with the Milky Way, or the star trails version?

Being with these two grandsons, to see the Milky Way with their own eyes, was an awesome experience. Having an even brighter and more detailed Milky Way pop up on their camera screens was even more amazing. It was a magical moment! That shared experience was suddenly worth all the trouble and inconvenience. I knew this had been the best use of my time. I don't always make the right choices, but this time I scored.

Postscript: "Grandpa" did all the post processing of these images. At some point, if they want to learn more about astrophotography, I'll teach that part to them.