I was wanting to try out some night-sky photography with a fisheye lens, but the early evening was very cloudy and not very promising. However, when I looked outside around 11:30 pm it appeared to be clear. I assembled an Olympus E-M5iii with a Rokinon 7.5mm f/3.5 fisheye lens and put it on a tracking mount and got set up in the back yard.
The sky was indeed clear, although I could detect some murk along the north and south horizons. The measured sky brightness directly overhead was sqml=21.80 mpsas. I was shocked. The darkest sky anywhere generally tops out near 22 mpsas, so this is nearly as good as it gets. I have measured a darker sky here in Creede only once.
Composition with a fisheye lens is tricky. If the lens is tilted upward, the horizon will curve up on each side as it is in this image:
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| Rokinon 7.5mm f/3.5, ISO 3200, 60 s. |
This image was processed from the raw data to bring out the faintest details of airglow along the horizon. The zenith point is about 1/8 of the frame down from the top.
The constellation Scorpius and its brightest star Antares was just emerging through the murky airglow above Snowshoe Mountain:
Higher in the sky, a meteor was captured between Corona Borealis and Arcturus:
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