Milky Way Rising

Oh man too many city lights! I want to see the Milky Way so bad!

If I were trying to take a still picture of the galaxy, could i use a point and shoot so long as I wasn't holding it myself?

It depends a bit on the P&S camera itself. You'll need a tripod to mount the camera on. If the P&S has a long enough exposure of at least about 15 seconds (preferably around a minute), then you ought to be able to get a shot of the Milky Way. If you can use manual focus to set the focus at infinity, you will have a better chance to get a good picture. And then use the 2 or 10 second delay to take the picture with the widest aperture. Also try the higher ISO settings around 400 should work.

Without light pollution I think that's what we would see.

Well, we do have some light pollution on Kitt Peak, but it is certainly a lot darker than most places.

light polution everywhere. :(

Nice work. It would be great to have a 24mm 1.8 instead of 2.8.  This would be the first time I ever wanted a Canon product rather than Nikon. :)

My 24mm f/1.8 lens is a Sigma which I believe you can buy in a Nikon mount. If I were to buy a similar lens again, I'd probably look at a 20mm lens - the 24mm is just not quite wide enough sometimes....

Awesome video! I'm trying to do something similar with my nikon d200 but it looks like my iso is going to have to be way up there because f/4 is the fastest I can go with my tokina 12-24. Beautiful work!

Yes, my images were taken at f/1.8, so I could get away with only ISO 400 or so to get the images I got with only 30 second exposures. If you can up the exposure to 60 seconds you'll get a little trailing but could back off on the ISO a bit....

Good luck! - Jim.