Night sky

I decided to figure out how to take pictures of the night sky with the Olympus E-P2. My last attempt was not entirely successful, due to focusing problems. The contrast detection autofocus does naturally not work against stars (nor would phase detection autofocus). Some quick experiments showed that manual focus works well against brighter stars, though. In manual focus mode it is very easy to activate the 10x magnification mode and fine tune the focus.

20 mm (40 mm equivalent) f1.7, ISO 400 and 10 s.


100 percent crop from the picture above for pixel peeping. The pine branch is unsharp because of the short DOF.


9 mm (18 mm equivalent), f4, ISO 400 and 25 s.


The great lamp in the night sky. 100 percent crop from a picture taken at 150 mm (300 mm equivalent) focal length.


The star sky pictures are not a detailed as they could be. I live at the outskirt of a large (for Finland) city and have a nice forest area just out my back yeard, but there is some amount of light pollution from the city. This time most of the stray light probably came from the full moon, though. There was some fog, which probably did not extent far up from the ground, and the moon lit up this layer.