The 5-day-old waxing crescent Moon near the Beehive star cluster, Messier 44, in Cancer on the evening of May 10, 2019, set in the deep blue twilight sky, and with Earthshine still visible on the dark side of the Moon. From eastern North America this evening the Moon appeared in front of the Beehive, but by the time darkness fell out west the Moon had moved east of the Beehive by a moon diameter. Technical: This is an HDR stack of 6 exposures for the lunar disk, tone-mapped in Photomatix Pro using Fusion/Natural Blend, with the sky from a single exposure, the longest in the set — HDRs can’t ever align and blend the Moon and stars accurately, as the Moon is shifting against the star background slightly. Taken through the Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm refractor at f/6 and with the Canon 6D MkII at ISO 400, and with exposures from 1 second in two stop increments to 1/500. As a further note, I tried AuroraHDR 2018 on this and it failed miserably, producing a very noisy image. Photoshop HDR produced a lot of edge artifacts, and luminosity masking was going to be tough to blend, naturally, so I gave Photomatix a go — it worked but only for the Moon itself.
Orion and the northern winter constellations, such as Canis Major, Gemini and Taurus, rising into a moonlit November night, from home in Alberta. The Beehive Cluster is the fuzzy spot at left, in Cancer below the stars of Gemini. Light is from the waxing gibbous Moon off frame at right. This is a stack of 4 x 20-second exposures for the ground and one 20-second exposure for the sky, all untracked with the Nikkor 14-24mm lens at f/4 and 14mm, and the Nikon D810a at ISO 1600.
This is a portrait of the winter sky rising in the southeast on January 9, 2021, taken from home in Alberta. The constellation of Orion is at centre with blue-white Sirius in Canis Major below and reddish-yellow Aldebaran in Taurus above. Castor and Pollux in Gemini are at left. Procyon in Canis Minor is between the Castor-Pollux pair and Sirius. Bright star clusters flank the scene, with the Pleiades (M45) at top and the Beehive Cluster (M44) in Cancer at far left. Several other smaller star clusters in and along the Milky Way are also visible, even at this scale with an ultra-wide lens. This is a stack of 10 30-second tracked exposures with the 15mm Venus Optics Laowa lens at f/4 on the Sony a7III at ISO 6400. and taken as part of lens testing this night.
