A panorama of Morant’s Curve, a famous viewpoint on the Bow River in Banff National Park, with an eastbound train on the CPR tracks under the stars of the winter sky. Illumination is from the 13-day gibbous Moon off frame at left. Orion is at centre; Sirius and Canis Major at left; and Taurus and the Pleiades at right. The main peak at centre is Mount Temple; the peaks at right are the ones around Lake Louise. I shot this March 19, 2019 at the start of the evening, from the new viewpoint on the Bow Valley Parkway. Morant’s Curve is named for the famed CPR photographer Nicholas Morant who often shot from here with large format film cameras. Now, how did I do this? I was shooting multi-segment panoramas at the viewpoint when a train whistle in the distance to the est alerted me to the oncoming train. I started the panorama segment shooting at the left, and just by good luck the train was in front of me at centre when I hit the central segment. I continued to the right to catch the blurred rest of the train snaking around Morant’s Curve. It took some adjustments of the masks in the panorama segments to get the train to blend well from segment to segment. This was stitched with PTGui as Photoshop would not handle this well. PTGui allows adjusting the masks on the individual segments. The equirectangular projection used stretches out and distorts the constellations a bit at top. Each segment is 8 seconds at f/3.2 and ISO 800 with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 in portrait orientation. I added a Luminar Orton glow effect to the ground for artistic effect.
A 360° panorama taken in the pre-dawn hours (4:45 a.m.) on December 8, 2013, from the Painted Pony Resort in SW New Mexico. The panorama takes in, from left to right: • Arcturus just on the treetop • the zodiacal light rising up from the east • red Mars embedded in the zodiacal light below Leo • the Milky Way from Puppis and Canis Major at left arching up and across the sky down into Perseus at right • Sirius the brightest star • Orion setting over the main house • Jupiter, the bright object at top centre in Gemini • Aldebaran and the Pleiades setting right of the main house in Taurus • Polaris over the smaller house at right • the Big Dipper pointing to Polaris at upper right • a green glow along the northern horizon above the smaller house that may be some aurora (there was a good display this night from northern latitudes) or may be intense airglow. • green and red bands throughout the sky are airglow • bands of high cloud also permeate the sky adding natural glows around the stars. This is a panorama created in PTGui software from 6 segments, all tracked, taken with the 14mm Rokinon lens at f/2.8 for 2.5 minutes each and with the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. PTGui does not preserve EXIF data.
Jupiter at top, the waning crescent Moon and Mercury (at lower centre) in pre-dawn sky, September 24, 2003. Mercury near its best in morning apparition. Pentax 6x7 camera with 120 format Fujichrome 100F slide film and 165mm lens at f/2.8. Fixed tripod with 1 second exposure. Scanned with Nikon 8000ED at 16x sampling and SuperFine Scan on, with Digitial ICE dust removal on. Taken from home. Notice how Moon is well above the ecliptic line defined by the Jupiter-Mercury line.
