The summer Milky Way in Sagittarius and Ophiuchus to the south along the horizon at 3 am on a May morning with the sky brightening and turning blue from dawn already. This was from my backyard at home in Alberta at latitude 51° North. The image also serves as a demo of an exposure time (45 seconds) exceeding the “500 Rule” and introducing some trailing. This was with the 35mm lens. The ground is a stack of 4 exposures, the sky from just one exposure. Also serves as a demo of Stack Modes for Workshops and articles. Shot as part of testing the SAM tracker.
A moonlit nightscape in the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, looking west to the setting summer Milky Way and the stars of Cygnus and Lyra, including Deneb and Lyra. Light is from the 8-day waxing Moon. It almost washes out the Milky Way. A stack of 4 x 15-second exposures mean combined to smooth noise for the ground, and a single 15-second exposure for the sky, all at f/2.5 with the Rokinon 14mm lens and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 1600.
The Milky Way over the region of Athabasca Pass, as seen from the highway viewpoint on the Icefields Parkway, in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Oct 22, 2016. It was this pass that David Thompson used primarily in the later 1700s and early 1800s as his route into BC for extending the fur trade across the Divide. He travelled back and forth across this pass during his employment with the North West Company. His Narratives provides great quote about his experience one winter night on the summit of the Pass: “My men were not at their ease, yet when night came they admired the brilliancy of the Stars, and as one of them said, he thought he could almost touch them with his hand.” The Milky Way here is the section through Aquila, with Altair at top and Mars bright above the peaks of the Continental Divide. Illumination is by starlight. This is a stack of 8 exposures, mean combined to smooth noise, for the ground and one exposure for the sky, all 25 seconds at f/2 with the Sigma 20mm lens, and Nkion D750 at ISO 6400.
