A panorama of the total eclipse of the Moon on January 31, 2018 from the Crowsnest Pass area of the Alberta Rocky Mountains near the Continental Divide. Crowsnest Mountain itself is at far right. Cassiopeia is just above Crowsnest Mountain. Gemini is just setting right of centre. This was about 6:33 am MST, just after mid-totality, but with the Moon still in some cloud, as it typically was this morning. This was from near Coleman, Alberta. The panorama is from 8 segments, each with the 35mm lens at f/2.8 for 15 seconds at ISO 1600 with the Canon 6D MkII. Stitching was with Adobe Camera Raw. The Moon itself is blend of 4 exposures: 15 seconds, 4 seconds, 1 second, and 1/4 second to retain the red disk of the eclipsed Moon while bringing out the stars in the twilight sky. This was looking west as the Moon was setting.
An urban nightscape of the constellations of Orion and Canis Major over the skyline of Calgary on January 18, 2018, on a very clear and moonless winter night, allowing stars to show up fairly well despite the light pollution. Sirius is above the Bow Tower building at left. I shot this from Crescent Road on the north bank of the Bow River, with Orion nearly due south as high as it could get. So this is a real scene, not a faked composite with a sky shot someplace else or at some other time layered in. However, the view was helped by the use of a NISI Natural Night light pollution filter on the lens which helped filter out the yellow emission lines from sodium vapour lights, and rendered the sky a more pleasing blue tint (this is not from moonlight). The faintest stars are about magnitude 7.5, not bad from a city site, though this was a very clear, haze-free night, the sky factor. In addition, the sky is a longer single exposure of 10 seconds at f/2.5 and ISO 400 (which brought out the stars more but overexposed the skyline), while the skyline is a stack of 4 x 3-second exposures at f/2.8 and ISO 400 (to better expose for the bright lights). This composited accommodated the huge range of brightness of the scene. something like an HDR blend. I shot this with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750. I added the star diffraction spikes for artistic effect using Astronomy Tools actions.
A composite showing the 2017 Geminid meteors streaking from the radiant point in Gemini at upper left, above the blue-white star Castor. 2 or 3 meteors are not Geminids as their paths do not project back to the radiant, but I have left them in regardless, as an illustration. This also illustrates how the meteor paths are shorter closer to the radiant and lengthen away from the radiant. This is a stack of 43 exposures, each 1-minute with the 24mm Canon lens at f/2.5 and filter-modified Canon 5D MkII camera at ISO 6400, set fast to pick up the fainter meteors. These were 43 exposures with meteors (some with 2 or 3 per frame) out of 455 taken over 5 hours. Orion and its red nebulas are at right. The Beehive star cluster, M44, is at lower left. Sirius is the bright star at lower right. The camera was on a Star Adventurer Mini tracking unit, so all the frames more or less aligned when stacked with the meteors in the correct relative position. The background sky comes from just one of the exposures. All the other frames are masked to show just the meteor. Taken December 13/14, 2017 during the very active 2017 Geminid meteor shower, and shot from Quailway Cottage in southeast Arizona, near Portal.
