The summer Milky Way to the southwest over Victoria Glacier and Lake Louise in Banff National Park, Alberta on a moonless night, August 29, 2016. The bright star at top is Altair, with the stars of Aquila being the main constellation here, with the Scutum starcloud just over the glacier and the stars of Ophiuchus to the right. The Serpens-Ophiuchus Double Cluster is prominent here just to the right of the Milky Way. Mt. Fairview to the left and others are partly illuminated by light spill from the Chateau Lake Louise and from highway lights in the valley below. This is a stack of 16 exposures for the ground, averaged to smooth noise by a factor of 3 stops, and one exposure for the sky, all 10 seconds at f/2 with the 20mm Sigma Art lens, and at ISO 6400 with the Nikon D750. All untracked and shot as part of a time-lapse sequence at a fairly high ISO and fast shutter speed, to capture the rapid cloud motion, and to capture 300 frames in under an hour before the Milky Way got too far advanced to the north. These frames are taken from a time with minimal cloud and the Milky Way in its best position over the glacier.
Sunset clouds streaking over time over the badlands of the Red Deer River valley at Horsethief Canyon, north of Drumheller, Alberta. Admittedly a rather surreal effect but submitted for fun — A stack of 300 images stacked as with a star trail image but in this case with short exposures taken at sunset as the clouds lit uo and were moving out of the west toward the camera. So the stacking created the streaking or trailing effect. I smoothed some of the stairstep effect introduced by the interval between exposures by applying a mild radial blur filter centred on the sunset point to further blur the cloud motion. The ground, however, comes from one exposure in the middle of the sequence. Stacking with the Advanced Stacker Plus actions from StarCircleAcademy, using the UltraStreaks effect. Taken with the Nikon D750 and 24mm Sigma lens at f/5.6 and the camera ion Auto Exposure, for a time-lapse of 600 frames. Only half were used here, the ones in mid-sequence with the brightest sunset colours. Taken August 20, 2016.
A composite of the Perseid meteor shower, on the peak night, Aug 11/12, 2016, looking northeast to the radiant point in Perseus left of centre, with the Pleiades and Hyades clusters in Taurus rising. There are 33 meteors here. Note the fairly consistent green to red tint of each meteor streak. A couple of streaks look more white and might be flaring satellites though their trajectory matches where a Perseid should be. The sky is also filled with bands of red and green airglow which in the time-lapse sequence are moving from south to north, right to left here. The airglow was bright enough that it was visible to the unaided eye as grey bands in the sky, especially the “cloud” around the Pleiades. The reddish/orange patches at upper left are the remains of a long-lived “smoke” trail from an expoding meteor earlier in the evening, which I of course missed capturing. This was taken from the Dark Sky Preserve of Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan, from the trailhead parking lot at the end of the 70 Mile Butte Road. This is a stack of 31 frames containing meteors (two frames had 2 meteors), shot from 1:13 am to 2:08 a.m. CST, so over 55 minutes. So considering the camera would have missed the fainter meteors and is seeing only one section of the sky, 33 meteors over 55 minutes is a great count, translating to perhaps ~ 100 to 150 over the whole sky? This is from latitude 49° N. The camera was not tracking the sky but was on a fixed tripod. I choose one frame with the best visibility of the airglow as the base layer. For every other meteor layer, I used Free Transform to rotate each frame around a point far off frame at upper left, close to where the celestial pole would be and then nudged each frame to bring the stars into close alignment with the base layer, especially near the meteor being layered in. This placed each meteor in its correct position in the sky in relation to the stars, essential for showing the effect of the radiant point accurately. Each layer above the base sky layer is masked to show just the meteor and is blended with Lighten mode. If I had not manually aligned the sky for each frame, the meteors would have ended up positioned where they appeared in relation to the ground but the radiant point would have been smeared — the meteors would have been in the wrong place. Unfortunately, it’s what I see in a lot of composited meteor shower shots. It would have been easier to have had this camera on a tracker so all frames would have been aligned coming out of the camera. But the other camera was on the tracker! The ground is a mean combined stack of 4 frames to smooth noise in the ground. Each frame is 30 seconds at f/2 with the Sigma 20mm lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 5000. The waxing Moon had set by the time this sequence started, leaving the sky dark and the airglow much more visible.
