The Milky Way in Sagittarius (toward the galactic centre) going down behind the badland hills along the Red Deer River. I shot this near East Coulee on Highway 10 in Alberta, on an autumn night. Some clouds were drifting through over the exposure times. Passing car headlights helped light the trees on the opposite bank. This is a stack of 4 tracked exposures for the sky (each 2 minutes at f/2.2 with the 24mm lens) and then 4 untracked exposures for the ground (each 4 minutes at f/2.5), all with the Canon 6D at ISO 800. The tracker was the iOptron Sky-Tracker. Stacking, using Mean stack mode, helps smooth noise. This was shot as a demo image for use in a video tutorial series.
The Moon in total eclipse on September 27, 2015 – the “supermoon” eclipse – shining red over the Milk River and sandstone formations at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta, with the Milky Way in full view in the sky darkened by the lunar eclipse. The Sweetgrass Hills of Montana are to the south. The centre of the Milky Way is at far right. The Andromeda Galaxy is at upper left. The Moon was in Pisces below the Square of Pegasus. It was a perfectly clear night, ideal conditions for shooting the eclipse and stars. This is a stack of 5 x 2-minute tracked exposures for the sky and 5 x 4-minute untracked exposures for the ground to smooth noise. The Moon itself comes from a short 30-second exposure to avoid overexposing the lunar disk. Illumination of the ground is from starlight. All exposures with the 15mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. The camera was on the iOptron Sky-Tracker.
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.
