This captures a panorama of the northern sky over the foreground landscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, with the waning Moon rising, and an arc of Northern Lights above the northern horizon. A Kp6 show was forecast for this night but nothing spectacular materialized -- we had just a quiescent arc across the north. This was on the night of August 17-18, 2022. The Moon rising at right is the last quarter Moon. Jupiter is the bright object at far right. The Big Dipper and Arcturus are at left; Polaris is at upper left of centre; Cassiopeia and Perseus are at right of centre; while Andromeda and Pegasus are at right. The Andromeda Galaxy is above the Moon. This is a panorama of a blend of 6 tracked (for the sky) and 6 untracked (for the ground) exposures: 2 minutes at f/2.8 and ISO 1600 for the ground and shadow detail, and 1 minute at f/2.8 and ISO 800 for the sky, all with the stock Canon R5 and RF15-35mm lens set at 19mm and the camera turned in portrait orientation. Spacing of the segments was at 30° intervals. The panorama segments for the ground and sky were stitched with Adobe Camera Raw into two panoramas using the same settings, then masked and blended with Photoshop. An additional short exposure of the segment with the Moon in it was blended in to reduce the bright Moon glare. The camera was on the Star Adventurer Mini tracker. The AstroPanel v6 extension panel and its excellent Hot Pixel removal action was used to suppress the abundance of hot pixels in the ground image, resulting from this being a very warm night, and my need to take the image set fast before the Moon rose too high -- so I did not use in-camera Long Exposure Noise Reduction, though I should have! I added a mild Orton effect glow with Luminar AI. The original is 18,800 by 6,500 pixels.
This captures the vertical sweep of the summer Milky Way over the foreground landscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta. The image serves as a good illustration of the richness of objects, dark dust lanes and bright starfields along the Milky Way, from Sagittarius low in the south at bottom, to Cygnus at top. In between are Aquila and Scutum, with part of Ophiuchus at right. This was from latitude 50.5° North, where Sagittarius and the galactic centre are low in sky. The Summer Triangle stars of Deneb, Vega and Altair are at top. This is a vertical panorama (a "vertorama"), made of a blend of tracked (for the sky) and untracked (for the ground) exposures: 5 x 2-minutes at f/2.8 and ISO 1600 for the ground, and 5 segments panning up the Milky Way, each 2 x 2-minutes at f/2.8 and ISO 800, all with the stock Canon R5 and RF15-35mm lens set at 28mm. The panorama segments for the sky were stitched with Adobe Camera Raw. The ground stack was masked and blended in with Photoshop. The camera was on the Star Adventurer Mini tracker. No filters were employed. The ground images were taken at the start of the sequence when the sky was fairly dark, not earlier in the evening in "blue hour." Illumination is therefore from starlight and some moonlight in the sky. This was on the night of August 17-18, 2022. The last quarter Moon was rising, and present in the sky off camera at left by the time I took the upper sky segments, so I have left in the slight blue tint from moonlight in the sky, to contrast with the green and earth tones of the ground. The AstroPanel v6 extension panel and its excellent Hot Pixel removal action was used to suppress the abundance of hot pixels in the ground image, resulting from this being a very warm night, and my need to take the image set fast before the Moon rose too high -- so I did not use in-camera Long Exposure Noise Reduction, though I should have! I added a mild Orton effect glow to the scene with Luminar AI. The original is 8,500 by 12,100 pixels.
The Full Moon rise of August 11, 2022 over the old grain elevator on Highway 10 at Dorothy, Alberta, in the Badlands of the Red Deer River valley. This was dubbed a "supermoon" and the "Sturgeon Moon" in the popular media. It just happened to rise at a location that placed it right down the south-east facing highway in the valley. I used The Photographer's Ephemeris to locate the spot to get the shot! This is a blend of two exposures: 6-second exposure for the ground and 1/4-second for the Moon, taken moments apart and both with the Canon R5 at ISO 800, on the William Optics 66mm f/7 apo refractor for a focal length of 460mm. I added a mild Orton glow effect to the ground with Luminar AI. Dodging and burning added with a neutral grey layer created with Lumenzia.
