A couple of widefields

Last night the sky turned good but the wind was gusting up to 50mph or more, so getting any sort of scope out was a bit of a nono! So I put my camera with wide angle (16mm=24mm in film terms) lens on a sturdy tripod and snapped off a few widefields. Here's a couple where everything stayed still enough for 15 secs...

Firstly centred on Saturn & Regulus with M44 to the right and Coma Berenices to the upper left...



Secondly looking higher up - Leo in the bottom right, Arcturus to the bottom left and Ursa Major up top. I'm sure M3 is in there too, midway between Arcturus and Cor Caroli...



As zooms go this 16-105mm is excellent with small round stars out to the corners even wide open at f3.5 - some corner darkening is evident though that's prtty normal in any lens wide open.

I really like the first one Paul.
I think the tree makes a great foreground object and is nicely centered. However, it appears a tad too bright. If you could tone down the brightness of it, it would be perfect.
Just my 2cent.

Thanks Michael! I wish I could tone down the tree actually - I could do it in PSE of course but I'd prefer to do it in reality - I live on the side of a hill and this shot shows my darkest sky which is to the SW - NE is the town of Larne so that tree is illuminated by all the Sodium in Larne!

Michael said what I was going to say Paul!