The iconic Parks Canada red chairs at the waterfowl viewing pond at the entrance of Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, Canada, on a moonlit autumn evening with the stars of the autumn sky rising in the northeast. Visible are Perseus, the W of Cassiopeia, and most of Andromeda, including the Andromeda Galaxy at upper right. The bright star at lower left is Capella in Auriga. The night was very windy, thus the blurred trees and bushes (there was no special lens blue filter applied!) in this 20-second exposure at f/2.8 and ISO 2000 with the Nikon D750 and Sigma 24mm lens, on a static tripod, no tracking. Light is from the First Quarter Moon.
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.
