Let there be light ... frames

The next time I attempted astro-photography was during a meteor shower period. I saw an article online about the upcoming lightshow and since I had just bought my first camera setup - Fujifilm X-E1 with 16-50mm kit lens, I thought it would be a fun thing to do. I started biking around Singapore at night trying to find a good location. Eventually I settled on Bedok Jetty at East Coast Park. I know to catch the meteor streak I would need a long exposure of a few seconds so thats what I did. I did not have an intervalometer with me so I had to use self timer to make sure my shots are free from camera shake. 80 plus shorts later I packed up and went home.

Ingested the photos into Lightroom and started tweaking exposure and contrast. I realised in each image, there is a “cloud” in the middle. Always at the same place, never changing in shape.

I had just shot the milky way by accident. I quickly went onto Youtube to learn how to properly process milky way photos and this is what I had learnt:

• Stacking is important.

• The pictures I took are called light frames. There are also other shots called bias frames, dark frames and flat frames.

• Deepsky stacker.

I returned the next few days still attempting to photograph the meteor shower, but also to get more frames for milky way.

At the very last day, after I packed up my tripod and camera, a single white light streaked across the sky. Just my luck.

What I did manage to capture however, was my first image of the milky way.