Legacy Astrophotography: Summer's Mid-Rift

Legacy Astrophotography: Summer's Mid-Rift, a photo by Nightfly Photography on Flickr.

I was fortunate to get a night where I could compose two long exposure photographs of our Milky Way's Great Rift, utilizing an equatorial platform.

You will note that Comet Garradd is located just west of Brocchi's Cluster.

A mosaic of two frames, each employed the use of a Pentax 67 camera and 165 f/2.8 portrait lens stopped to f/4.8 and a 60 minute exposure on Fujicolor Superia 100 (CN) photographic film. The two frames were scanned on an Epson V600 and assembled in Adobe Photoshop.

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The Legacy Project is a planned sequence of photographs of the night sky. Over the last several years astrophotographers have switched to digital as the medium of choice. While there are many reasons to do this, film is still a great way to capture wide-field images of the Milky Way and the sky in general.

The project's mission is to continue film's "Legacy" as a medium for long exposure images of the night sky.

The sequence of photos started in October 2009 and will end at a point yet to be determined.

Great care has been given to compose, expose, and process each image. Only the best combination of film, lenses and exposure times are used.

Each image is shot under the dark skies of my home in Maine.

My goal is to produce the finest images obtainable with film emulsions.