The Perseid meteor shower on August 11, 2015, the night before peak night, taken from a canola field in southern Alberta. Some aurora lights the sky and some clouds are drifting through the scene. The Milky Way in Perseus and Cassiopeia rises in the northeast. The camera is looking toward the radiant of the meteor shower in Perseus. This is a composite stack of 10 images, out of a sequence of 160 shot in a sequence for a time-lapse or single-image stacking. The camera was the Canon 6D at ISO 3200, and the lens was the 14mm Rokinon at f/2.8, all exposures for 60 seconds but with the camera on a fixed tripod - so no tracking here. The ground - a canola field - comes from a mean-combine average of the 10 frames to smooth noise. The sky and one meteor is from one frame, one with the best aurora. To blend in the meteors from the other 9 frames taken at earlier and later times I rotated those frames manually around the celestial pole at top left (at Polaris) to place those skies in close to the correct position reletive to the base sky image. I then masked out all but the meteors in those additonal frames, so that they are close to their correct stellar position relative to the fixed background layer and to the radiant point of the shower in Perseus at centre frame. However, one or two meteors don’t seem to belong and may be sporadics. I cloned out a distracting aircraft and satellite.
The Big Dipper over an abandoned pioneer house, near Bow Island, Alberta, with the scene lit by the almost Full Moon, July 30, 2015. This is a single frame from a 300-frame time-lapse dolly sequence.
Circumpolar star trails circling above an old rustic and abandoned house near Bow Island, Alberta, with illumination from the nearly Full Moon. Cassiopeia is near centre. Polaris is at top left. This is a stack of 140 frames from a time-lapse sequence with additional frames added for the first and last stars, and the ground coming from a mean combine stack of 8 frames to reduce noise. Each frame is 10 seconds at f/4 with the 16-35mm lens and ISO 1600 with the Canon 6D. Stacked with Advanced Stacker Actions, using the Ultrastreaks effect, from within Photoshop.
