A passage of the International Space Station high across the north in the late blue hour of twilight, with the stars appearing, though the ISS outshines them all. This was the 5:17 pm pass on December 6, 2018 from southern Alberta, and taken with a fixed camera on a tripod, so the stars are trailing slightly as the rotate about Polaris at lower centre. The view is looking north though the fish-eye lens takes in much of the sky. The Big Dipper skims low across the north at botton. On board was Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques on his third day in space of a 6-month mission. This is a stack of 21 10-second exposures at f/3.5 with the Sigma 8mm lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 400. The one-second interval between exposures adds the gaps.
A rare sight from home in rural Alberta — a sky filled with light pillars, an atmospheric phenomenon caused by flat ice crystals in the still air, reflecting the lights below, in this case from farms and gas plants, and from towns in the distance. I had never seen these from home before; they are more common within cities with the greater abundance of lights. The effect was short-lived. It was fading out even 15 minutes after I took this. There was just enough icy haze or fog (it had snowed earlier in the day so the air was moist) to produce the light pillars but not so much as to obscure the stars. The Big Dipper is at left; Polaris is at top left; Auriga, Taurus and the Pleiades are rising at right. The red foreground is from lights on my deck. This is a 4-section panorama with the Venus Optics 15mm lens at f/2 and Sony a7III at ISO 3200 for 20 seconds each. Stitched with Adobe Camera Raw.
A display of Northern Lights along the coast of Norway on October 19, 2018, seen through clouds, taken from the deck of the ms Trollfjord. The Big Dipper is at upper right. With the 15mm Laowa lens at f/2 for 3.2 seconds at ISO 6400 with the Sony a7III camera.
