A panorama of the flower-filled Blakiston Valley on a moody moonlit cloudy night at Waterton Lakes National Park, June 24, 2015. The Big Dipper is at upper right, with its handle pointing to Arcturus at left of centre. Spica is at far left. A subtle halo surrounds the first quarter Moon which has just set behind Crandell Mountain at left. This is a 9-segment panorama with the Nikon D750 and 24mm lens, mounted portrait, and stitched with Photoshop using spherical geometry and corrected with Wide Angle Adaptive Lens Correction to straighten the scene. Liberal use of Highlight and Shadow recovery in ACR and Shadows and Highlights in PS brought out the flower-filled foreground while retaining detail in the bright sky. Each segment was 30 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 1600.
Circumpolar star trails over the upper field of the Texas Star Party, May 13, 2015. The star party attracts hundreds of avid stargazers to the Prude Ranch near Fort Davis, Texas each year to enjoy the dark skies. The three observing fields are filled with telescopes from the basic to sophisticated rigs for astrophotography. I aimed the camera to look north over the field to capture the stars circling around Polaris in circumpolar trails over about 1 hour. Some cloud and haze obscured parts of the sky. Lights from cities to the north add the sky glow at right. The streaks at top are from the stars of the Big Dipper. This is a stack of 55 exposures, each 1 minute long, at f/2.8 with the 14mm lens and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 3200. The foreground comes from a single image in the series, masked and layered in Photoshop. The images were stacked using the Long Trails tapering effect with the Advanced Stacker Actions from Star Circle Academy.
A strange red/magenta auroral arc overhead across the sky, with a more normal green diffuse glow to the north, as seen on May 10, 2015, in a stack of 80 frames taken over 45 minutes. The Big Dipper is overhead in the centre of the frame, Jupiter is at left in the west and Arcturus is at top to the south. I shot this from home, using an 8mm fish-eye lens to take in most of the sky, with the camera looking north. The 80 exposures were stacked and blended with Advanced Stacker Actions from StarCircleAcademy.com using the Long Trails effect. Each exposure was 32 seconds at f/3.6 and ISO 3200 with the Canon 6D. An individual exposure adds the more point-like stars at the start of the tapered star trails, and add the blue from the last twilight glow still illuminating the sky at the start of the sequence.
