The images in the panorama above were taken at 2‑minute intervals (with occasional adjustment to the camera’s aim). They’re all 250mm, f/5.6, and either 1/100s, ISO 100 (the crescents) or 1s, 200 ISO (the ruddy disks).
Since I was already out there, and the sky was clear, I set up my 2nd camera, pointing straight up, to get some star trails. (And satellite tracks aplenty, some iridium flares, and maybe a very small meteor or two.)
This one’s made up of ~630 images, each 11mm, f/2.8, 5s. (I didn’t check the ISO on these, but I’d guess it’s in the 100–400 range.)
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.
I think it was worth it, even if a thunderstorm woke me up early this morning.
I shot at Spruces for about an hour and a half, and met a couple who had stopped in on their way from Brandon to Dauphin. (Hi, Doms & Debs, if you’re reading this!)
Here are a couple timelapses, one of the Milky Way floating above Clear Lake and another of the stars wheeling across the sky.
Last night the sky was clear and my batteries were charged. I loaded up my gear and headed to a spot I found last fall: an abandoned church south of me.
For almost the entire time I was there—about 10:45pm till 2am—it was just me and the fireflies and the crickets. A truck drove by at one point (very slowly, because I’d seen them coming and turned on my car’s lights), but other than that I was alone under the stars.
Look at all those fireflies.
I did up a multi-photo panorama, too, before I left.
Below is a timelapse of the night. It’s made of 169 still images, each one a 30-second exposure at 11mm, f/2.8, ISO800.
It was almost 3am by the time I got to bed. It’s been a while since I stayed up that late. I think it was worth it, though.
Update
I just spent 90 minutes or so stacking 16 images from my 2nd camera into this image of a portion of the galaxy.
Yesterday was my birthday, and the sky was clear and the aurora data were pretty good. So about 10pm I hit the road, and got these photos about 15 minutes from my house.
Above: an 11-photo panorama stretching from west to east.
The stars were sharp and clear, too, in the cold air, so I snapped some photos of one of my favourite constellations, Orion.
And because my cameras were nice and still for most of the time, I have a minute or so of timelapse video for you. Each second of video is a minute of real time.
The aurora data were good last night, but I’d had a long day so I didn’t go out in the countryside last night. I did set up a camera in the spare room, in case it got bright enough to be seen over the city lights. At worst, I thought, I’d get a few hours’ worth of star trails.
Oh, and the star trails turned out OK, too.
I set up the camera around midnight; the battery finally died around 4:35am. The trails above are made from about 2,200 frames, each 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 800.
