The solution, and thankfully there is one, is to take the movement of the night sky out of the equation. Add in cranking the ISO to 6400, even on my extremely capable Canon 5DmkIV, and it’s an uphill battle to get a clean good looking image out of a single frame. Phenomenon known as Coma and Astigmatism turn what should be round points of light into bird shapes or comets, are present and strong in this lens when the aperture is wide open. The Canon 50mm f/1.4, while being an excellent value mid-range all-around portrait lens that has been in my kit since almost the very beginning, has some serious short comings when its pointed at pin point sources of light, such as the hundreds of stars in the night sky. Late in 2018, after reviewing some of my longer focal length shots from the previous couple years, it was the 50mm Milky Way core ‘portraits’ that were not quite up to the standard that I set for myself. To combat this and still get enough light to the sensor and overall exposure the apertures have to stay wide and the ISO high – each of these come with their own issues.

With the 50mm, you have at most 10 sec, realistically most of my shots were starting to show some streaking at closer to 6-8sec exposure times. The downside of shooting with a longer focal length such as the 50mm is the extremely short exposure times possible before starting to show star movement. While the 14mm afforded lots of opportunities to capture a lot of the landscape and still include enough sky to show off the slender arch of the Milky Way, on the opposite end of the spectrum the 50mm filled almost the entire sky with the amazing details of the Milky Way core. Experimenting with different focal lengths ranging from the ultra-wide 14mm all the way to 50mm primes on my full frame Canon camera bodies it was amazing to see the different looks the Milky Way core and surrounding sky took on and how it affected the overall image. After a couple years of exploring the natural landscapes under the light of our nearest star – the sun, I began to explore and work some in the field of wide field astrophotography landscapes, capturing the natural world under the wide open night skies. My progression in photography started with a desire to spend more time outdoors, in the fresh air of nature and away from a computer screen.

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