A panorama of Morant’s Curve, a famous viewpoint on the Bow River in Banff National Park, with an eastbound train on the CPR tracks under the stars of the winter sky. Illumination is from the 13-day gibbous Moon off frame at left. Orion is at centre; Sirius and Canis Major at left; and Taurus and the Pleiades at right. The main peak at centre is Mount Temple; the peaks at right are the ones around Lake Louise. I shot this March 19, 2019 at the start of the evening, from the new viewpoint on the Bow Valley Parkway. Morant’s Curve is named for the famed CPR photographer Nicholas Morant who often shot from here with large format film cameras. Now, how did I do this? I was shooting multi-segment panoramas at the viewpoint when a train whistle in the distance to the est alerted me to the oncoming train. I started the panorama segment shooting at the left, and just by good luck the train was in front of me at centre when I hit the central segment. I continued to the right to catch the blurred rest of the train snaking around Morant’s Curve. It took some adjustments of the masks in the panorama segments to get the train to blend well from segment to segment. This was stitched with PTGui as Photoshop would not handle this well. PTGui allows adjusting the masks on the individual segments. The equirectangular projection used stretches out and distorts the constellations a bit at top. Each segment is 8 seconds at f/3.2 and ISO 800 with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 in portrait orientation. I added a Luminar Orton glow effect to the ground for artistic effect.
A 360° panorama of the Milky Way arching over the sandstone hoodoos of Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta, near the Alberta-Montana border. The galactic centre in Sagittarius is due south over Montana’s Sweetgrass Hills. Jupiter is bright at right, Saturn is lost amid the starclouds of Sagittarius, while Mars is bright and rising at left of the Milky Way in the southeast. Vega is the bright star at top. The Big Dipper and Polaris are at far left to the north. Some green bands of airglow colour the sky. The sky at left to the north is bright with perpetual twilight present in the sky from this latitude of 49° N and date of June 8/9, 2018. The ground is illuminated only by starlight. Writing-on-Stone Park contains the greatest concentration of rock art on the North American Great Plains. There are over 50 petroglyph sites and thousands of works. The park also showcases a North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) outpost reconstructed on its original site. The Park is important and sacred to the Blackfoot and many other aboriginal tribes. The Park has been nominated by Parks Canada and the Government of Canada as a World Heritage Site. Its UNESCO application was filed under the name Áísínai’pi which is Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) meaning "it is pictured / written". The provincial park is synonymous with the Áísínai’pi National Historic Site of Canada. In Blackfoot (Blackfeet in the U.S.) legend, the Milky Way is known as the Wolf Trail (Makoyohsokoyi) or the Buffalo Trail. This is a 21-panel panorama, in 3 tiers of 7 panels each, shot with the Nikon D750 and Sigma 20mm Art lens at f/2 with each segment 30 seconds at ISO 6400. The camera was on the Syrp Genie Mini motion controller to automate the horizontal panning and camera operation. Stitching was with PTGui. I shot this about 1:30 am MDT, before the Milky Way came overhead, and in mid-June, to also confine the Milky Way to the eastern sky as an arch in a panorama. This type of Milky Way arch pano is not possible in August when the sky would be darker.
A 360° panorama of the Milky Way and night sky taken at Red Rock Canyon in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada. I shot this Sept 21, 2014 on a very clear night with no noticeable aurora and very little airglow. The ground is lit solely by starlight. This is a stitch of 8 segments, each shot with the 15mm full-frame fisheye lens, for 1 minute at f/2.8 and with the Canon 6D at ISO 6400. I used PTGui to stitch the segments, with this version being a spherical fish-eye projection.
