Making the most from a blackout

I was trying to take a photograph of the Milky Way. Serious! There was a power failure here last night. My neighbourhood in Bukit Mertajam was plunged into darkness at about 9.15pm for about 50 minutes. I was changing channels on the television set and suddenly, poof! The lights went out. So I went outdoors - but still within my compound because the dratted automatic gate could not open without electricity - and peered upwards at the sky.

Well, I thought to myself, might as well see whether I can see some stars since normally, light pollution from the street laps and neighbours' houses would make that impossible. Didn't see many stars above me. Possibly due to my own deteriorating eyesight. But right up above me was Arcturus. And then I noticed Bootes and Spica. Further away northwards, I think I saw three stars from the Hercules constellation.

Looking westwards, I think it was Regulus in Leo but I can't be sure. Anyway, I couldn't see many stars there. Southwards gave me a bit more luck. As my eyes became more accustomed to the dark, there were quite a number of stars there but I couldn't make out what they were. A sky chart on my mobile phone told me that the Milky Way was in that direction.

Anyway, I wasn't thinking of any photography at that stage. Not until a former colleague phoned me to make the most of this opportunity to try out Milky Way photography. But my camera's not adequate for this job, I protested. Try lah, he said, and then he gave me some rough guidelines on my camera's settings. So I mounted my little Olympus E-PL7 on the tripod and aimed it southwards towards where I believed the Milky Way was.

As a first experiment, it wasn't successful. But I did manage to take several pictures of the sky in that southward direction and the results surprised me a lot. Stars that did not normally show up in my vision appeared in my images. So I did some digital manipulation on the computer and I think this picture could be considered the best among the batch I took last night at about 11.30pm. Maybe I should try again during the next blackout.

PS. I should add that this wasn't my first attempt at trying to photograph the Milky Way. The first time was in 2011 when I was in a small New Zealand town called Twizel. Read it here.