On Tuesday night my mate and I decided to head out and do some night photography to give his new lens a good run. We now both had access to a Tokina f/2.8 AT-X 116 Pro DX lens so we decided to give them a run at the same time. The moon set around 10pm and the sky was completely clear of clouds and the milky way could easily be seen stretching from one side of the horizon to the other so we decided to do some astrophotography.

While we were setting our gear up, I put my camera on top of the car facing straight up and managed to catch this shot of the milky way.

More photos after the break.

This next shot is a panoramic stitch of the area where we set up. The amount of stars visible with the naked eye was astounding. Living in town I never see the sky like this and it was awe inspiring.

Now what we came out to originally do. We had our gear set up to complete a couple of hours worth of photos to make some star trail shots. Unbeknownst to us (but probably something we should have expected) about half way through our lenses were attacked by condensation and it rendered about half the photos unusable. Next time I will try using some kind of heating system to make sure condensation does not become an issue again. Regardless, with half the images still perfectly usable, I was able to put together this shot.

My mate managed to get a pretty similar shot to mine which you can view here.