The Pleiades rising behind the rustic cabins and outbuildings of the historic Larson Ranch in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan. Aurora shines to the left in the north while green airglow illuminates the sky to the east above the buildings. Grasslands is a Dark Sky Preserve. And the sky is very dark. All illumination here is natural — note the dark clouds seen against the brighter airglow-lit sky. This is a stack of 4 exposures for the ground to smooth noise and one exposure for the sky, all untracked, and 30 seconds at f/2 with the 20mm Sigma lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 3200.
The summer Milky Way and galactic centre area to the south over the Milk River in Alberta and the Sweetgrass Hills of Montana, from the viewpoint road at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta, on New Moon night, August 1, 2016. Sagittarius and the Dark Horse of dust lanes in Ophiuchus and Serpens is above the southern horizon, as are the star clusters M6 and M7 in Scorpius. Mars and Saturn are at right, with Saturn above Antares. This is a stack of 10 images, average mean combined, for the ground to smooth noise, and a single untracked exposure for the sky. All are 30 seconds at f/2 with the 20mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 4000. These frames were from the beginning of a motion control panning sequence for a time-lapse movie, with the Syrp Genie Mini, but in the initial frames before the Genie began to move.
The Milky Way over the sandstone hoodoos of Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta. This is a comppsite of a single 30-second untracked exposure for the sky with the Canon 6D at ISO 4000, and 24mm lens at f/2, as the final frame of a 300-frame time-lapse, with a 6.5-minute exposure for the ground, taken at the end of the time-lapse with the lens stopped down to f/4 and the Canon at ISO 1600 for lower noise and better depth of field. This final frame of the star trail time-lapse at Writing-on-Stone is made to crossfade to from the movie. Two versions of the ground are in the layered PSD file for demo purposes — 1) from a stack of the last 10 frames and 2) from a single 6.5 minute exposure with an LENR dark frame but the camera shifted a little so that image had to be manually aligned.
