The Milky Way at Blackrock Diving Tower

With another clear night forecast, I made the decision to head out and get a Milky Way shot-again! Instead of going down to the Cliffs of Moher, I stayed local and visited my favourite Galway haunt: Blackrock Diving Tower. No swimming (or jumping) this time. I ran two cameras, the Fujifilm X-T5 with the Viltrox 13mm f1.4 for the sky and the X-T4 with Samyang 12mm f2 for the foreground.

You can see the Milky Way in the single exposure shots from the X-T4, but using the Omegon LX3 Minitracker allowed me to get the longer exposure, which captures more detail. Hopefully we'll get more nights like last night in the immediate future before the best of the night sky hides for the Winter as Orion rises.

While I knew where the Milky was from the combination of the constellations Cygnus, Aquila and Lyra, I still used the Photopills app on the phone to confirm the position. Let's not kid ourselves, there's still a lot of light pollution even facing southwestish at Blackrock. If you get out of the light and squint, you can see the Milky Way very faintly. It takes a long exposure to capture it. Look for the 3 bright stars of the Summer Triangle. Deneb up high, Vega off to the right and Altair down below if you’re not using the app.

Yes, this really was shot at Blackrock. Two photos, one for the tower and one for the Milky Way. I processed the files in Adobe Lightroom Classic and blended them in Photopshop using the Sky mask. There was a lot of yellow from light pollution at the bottom right of the frame, and I couldn't remove all of it. Still, it looks way better that it was.

The main issue I’ve had the last few nights is that I couldn’t get a good vertical angle from the tracker once set up to track to the North Star. For this I needed an L-Bracket. An L-Bracket allows you to swap between landscape and portrait positions without moving your tripod head. My X-T5 L-bracket arrives later today-a day late of course. The X-T4 bracket didn't fit at all, but I did find an old generic bracket that did the trick, allowing me to get this shot.