The Milky Way over Baine's Baobabs

Excellent image. I like the comp and vertical orientation.

The silhouetted trees at the bottom really add interest to the image. Excellent shot of the Milky Way.

nice shot.
the baobas are interesting elements here...
which lens are yu using ?
imho the lens is not working good here. a lot of aberrations can be seen even at a small size like here ont the upper stars....
if yu print this big i think you will see a lot of aberrations ....

andre paul wrote:which lens are yu using ?
imho the lens is not working good here. a lot of aberrations can be seen even at a small size like here ont the upper stars....
if yu print  this big i think you will see a lot of aberrations ....

You're probably right. Like everything in Photography, it was a compromise.

The lens is a Tamron 11-20 F2.8. It's a DX lens. What I found is that it doesn't vignette on an FX body from 16mm to 20mm. (And what I've found since that trip is the lens doesn't vignette from 12.5mm to 20mm using a 1.2x crop on the D810 bodies if I remove the hood from the lens!)

When I left for this safari, I had no plan to try to visit this location at night nor was I visiting any other location in Botswana or the surrounding area (say Vic Fall) where I would need a wide angle lens. The amount of time I figured I'd be using the lens was for about two hours on a trip that was around 20 days long. That lens would work on my D500 or D810 and it was a reasonably light lens that wouldn't take up much space in the bag. And it was wider than my Nikon 20mm F1.8 especially on the D500 which is about the same size and weight as this lens.

After getting to Africa and talking to the guide about that extension trip, we both realized that the moon would be down in the evening until about 10:30 pm local time on the very last day we were going to be in N'xai Pan. Our original camp site was too far away from the Baobabs to do an evening shoot and the Baobabs were too far away from the water hole to be able to get to it for the normal morning Safari drives.

After a good ten days of discussion about the pros and cons, the guide gave a solution that required that his staff do a bunch more work during that extension. His solution was moving the camp close to the grove for only one evening, the last night we would be in N'xai Pan. So I used what I had even if it isn't the best for night sky work and I doubt I'll get that opportunity again.

Five of us, which included the guide, spent the evening at the grove getting what we could. No one had truly the right equipment but we all end up happy with the experience.

tony, cool story!
i guess its true, its better having a good image ( like yours ) instead of no image.... the perfect image is not technically always possible...
by the way , aplying a donut like brush can remove coma and other aberrations from stars, if needed, even though it takes a bit of time

https://www.lonelyspeck.com/removing-co ... -tutorial/

just posting but maybe yu already have used it .....

regards
andre.

I haven't done any or that type of correction on this image. Nor was I familiar with this technique. Thanks for posting it.

Nice one, Baine's Baobabs is a great spot, too bad you didn't have a better lens, but it's better than no wide angle at all!

Great image...the trees give a haunting feeling to the skyward milky way.