Last night I found myself on Road 81W about half a mile south of Highway 16. I had my camera and my tripod, so I thought, Well, why not? Why not take some shots of the Milky Way?
The header image, above, is a single shot of the galaxy above the prairie horizon.
This is a panoramic photo, nine photos, roughly 3×3, to capture more of the height of the galaxy than I could with any single image.
And this is an 11-image stack of a portion of the galaxy, which hopefully brings out some of the detail better than any single shot could.
Info for Nerds
All images were 30 second exposures at 11mm, f/2.8, ISO 3200.
I merged[1]Use the “Lighten Only” mode, Pat, for future reference. 10 dark frames into a single “dark master”[2]Sounds Sith, but it ain’t. to eliminate or at least limit hot pixels in the images. The Image Magick command composite {image}.jpg -compose minus_dst {dark-frame}.jpg {image}_cleaned.jpg is how I did the dark frame subtraction.
The aligning and stacking was done with tools from Hugin Panorama Tools[3]Hugin is part of Panorama Tools, apparently. and Image Magick—align_image_stack *.jpg -a aligned_ to align the images, then mogrify -format jpg *.tif to convert the TIFF files to JPEG, mostly so my computer isn’t bogging down trying to process huge image files.
The panorama was created with Hugin—my luck with aligning night-time panoramas with Huginn is hit-or-miss, but I find it generally can find enough control points in a group of Milky Way shots to do its magic.
…I should just make a page about all that, shouldn’t I. A reference for my own use, if no one else’s.
Interested in prints of my photos? Let me know, and we can work something out.
Your photos are spectacular! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks! I really do enjoy getting out in the dark to do this sort of thing.