The stars of the northern winter sky rising at dawn on the morning of August 14, 2020, from home in southern Alberta. The waning crescent Moon is overexposed here, shining above bright Venus , then in southern Gemini as a bright “morning star” in the east. Mars is also bright and reddish, to the south at far right. Orion is rising over the ripening wheatfield at centre. Above Orion is Taurus with the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters. The bright star to the left and above the Moon is Capella in Auriga. Castor and Pollux are rising at left. A flaring satellite trail appears below Venus. This is a two-segment panorama with the 14mm Sigma Art lens at f/2.5 and Nikon D750 at ISO 800 for 20 seconds each. Stitched with PTGui which erases all the metadata from the image. I added a mild Orton Glow effect with Luminar Flex.
This is a 360° panorama of the dawn sky on September 21, 2020 from home in Alberta, with the Zodiacal Light in the east at left, with bright Venus embedded in the Zodiacal Light. Mars, near opposition, is bright and orange at right of centre. The two planets nicely flank the Milky Way and the bright stars of Orion and the winter sky. The summer Milky Way is setting at far right in the northwest. The Big Dipper is at far left to the northeast. The Beehive Cluster, M44, is above Venus; the Pleiades, M45, is at top; while the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, is at upper right. Sirius is above the horizon to the south at left of centre. The stars of Leo are just rising amid the twilight below Venus. This is a panorama of 12 segments, at 30° spacing, with the Sigma 14mm Art lens at f/2 (in landscape orientation) and Nikon D750 at ISO 1600, all 30 seconds untracked. Stitched with PTGui. Camera Raw handled it but give no control over the framing. The light pollution from Strathmore and Calgary light the horizon at right. I shot this about 5:30 am just as the sky was brightening with twilight, enough to colour the sky but not wash out the Milky Way and Zodiacal Light, a narrow window of time as the sky changes colour and brightness surprisingly quickly, even at my latitude of 51° N. This was shot on a very clear morning after several days of smoky skies from fires in the western U.S.
This is a 360° "all-sky" or fish-eye panorama of the northern autumn sky and Milky Way, taken from home December 6, 2020 from my latitude of 51° North. The Milky Way is arching directly overhead, with the summer Milky Way in Cygnus setting in the west at right, and the winter Milky Way and Orion rising in the east at left. At centre overhead is the segment of the Milky Way through Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Perseus and Auriga prominent in the autumn months. In this direction we are looking out toward the edge of our Galaxy, toward the outer Perseus arm, in the direction opposite the galactic core which is well below the horizon here. The South Galactic Pole area in Sculptor is low in the south just above the horizon at bottom. So we are looking down out the "bottom" of the plane of he galaxy here, at least for the part of the sky below, or south of, the Milky Way. A faint band of Zodiacal Light and Zodiacal Band can be seen extending up from the southwest at lower right and extending along the ecliptic through Mars and toward the Pleiades. The counterglow of the Gegenschein, at the point directly opposite the Sun is partly lost here in the Milky Way in Taurus. Along the Milky Way we see various red nebulas, regions of star formation, notably the North America Nebula (NGC 7000) at right, and the California Nebula (NGC 1499) at left above the blue Pleiades star cluster. At centre are various IC-catalog nebulas in Cepheus and Cassiopeia. The Orion Nebula is just riising at left. The bright red object almost due south below centre is Mars. At centre almost directly overhead is the Andromeda Galaxy. Polaris is above centre due north, with the Big Dipper low in the north at top. The sky is tinted with red and green bands of natural airglow, but some low clouds also reflect the artifical glows from towns and highway lights on the horizion. At right, the white glow along the western horizon is from the now-LED dominant light pollution from Strathmore and Calgary. This is a multi-segment and multi-tier panorama made from 31 (!) segments shot in 4 tiers from the zenith to the horizon, each segment with a 24mm Sigma Art lens at f/2 for 30 seconds each, untracked, and with the Canon EOS Ra at ISO 3200. I used a Sky-Watcher AZ-GTi "GoTo" mount to perform the automated shooting -- it moved from segment to segment and fired the camera shutter, taking about 16 minutes to take all the segments. The segments were stitched with PTGui, which did a masterful job but did produce a massive 170 gigabyte file for the final layered export, taking several hours to render it. But it worked! The original image is 17,300 by 17,300 pixels.
