A nightscape scene at Linnet Lake area in Waterton Lakes National Park, looking east over Upper Waterton Lake and toward Vimy Peak, with autumn stars rising in the east, and autumn trees in full colout. The red chairs are the iconic chairs Parks Canada places at many viewpoints in National Parks and Historic Sites. This was a very windy night! This is a frane from a time-lapse, at ISO 6400 and f/2.2 with the Nikon D750 and Sigma 24mm lens, for 20 seconds. Passing car headlights provided the foreground light painting.
Venus shines brightly, and nearly at its brightest at magnitude -4.7, in the dawn sky on a very frosty morning at 5 am, on September 17, 2015, from home in southern Alberta. Venus appears amid the faint glow of the Zodiacal Light, sometimes called the “False Dawn,” stretching vertically from the dawn horizon in the east, up and to the right, and reaching the Milky Way that runs down the frame from top centre to bottom right. Orion and the winter stars shine in the Milky Way, with Sirius above the trees at lower right. The Beehive Cluster, M44, appears as the small group of stars above Venus. The Pleiades, M45, is at top right. Mars is the brightest object left of Venus, with the bright star Regulus just below it and rising in the east. The stars of the Big Dipper are at far left at the edge of the frame. The sky is beginning to brighten with the real glow of morning. This is a stack of 4 x 2-minute exposures, tracked and mean combine stacked, for the sky and 2 x 2-minute exposures, untracked and stacked, for the ground to minimize blurring in the starlit ground. The Canon 6D was on the iOptron Sky-Tracker, shooting at ISO 1250 with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens at f/3.5. The stacking with a mean combine stack mode smooths noise in both sky and ground.
The Big Dipper and Ursa Major over the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, on Sept 11, 2015 taken on a night of aurora shooting. The scene is lit by aurora and starlight. An arc of aurora is on the horizon while wispy bands of airglow are visible above the aurora. The sky is a single untracked exposure of 30 seconds at f/2 with the Sigma 24mm lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 3200, while the ground is a Mean Combine stack of 5 similar exposures to smooth noise.
