A 360° panorama of the night sky and prairie landscape from the Visitor Centre and farmyard at the Old Man on His Back Prairie & Heritage Conservation Area in southwest Saskatchewan. The Milky Way arches across the eastern sky from north to south, while an aurora display (faint to the naked eye) glows in an arch of green and magenta across the northern horizon. The pioneer house was built in the 1920s and this was a working ranch until the 1990s when the land was turned over to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to turn into a natural area to preserve the short grass prairie habitat. This a stitch of 8 segments, each a 1 minute untracked exposure at f/3.5 with the 15mm lens and ISO 4000 with the Canon 6D. Stitched with PTGui software. I shot these May 18, 2015.
A 360° panorama taken in the pre-dawn hours (4:45 a.m.) on December 8, 2013, from the Painted Pony Resort in SW New Mexico. The panorama takes in, from left to right: • Arcturus just on the treetop • the zodiacal light rising up from the east • red Mars embedded in the zodiacal light below Leo • the Milky Way from Puppis and Canis Major at left arching up and across the sky down into Perseus at right • Sirius the brightest star • Orion setting over the main house • Jupiter, the bright object at top centre in Gemini • Aldebaran and the Pleiades setting right of the main house in Taurus • Polaris over the smaller house at right • the Big Dipper pointing to Polaris at upper right • a green glow along the northern horizon above the smaller house that may be some aurora (there was a good display this night from northern latitudes) or may be intense airglow. • green and red bands throughout the sky are airglow • bands of high cloud also permeate the sky adding natural glows around the stars. This is a panorama created in PTGui software from 6 segments, all tracked, taken with the 14mm Rokinon lens at f/2.8 for 2.5 minutes each and with the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. PTGui does not preserve EXIF data.
A 200° wide panorama of the famous scene on the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff of Morant’s Curve on the CPR rail line, a photogenic spot for train spotting made famous by CPR photographer Nicholas Morant. The Bow River makes a sweeping bend here, near Mt. Temple at centre and Lake Louise. Here, the Milky Way sweeps down to the south at left, with the star clouds of Sagittarius and Scorpius at the end of the river. Mars is the bright object at left, with Saturn to the left of Mars, and bright Antares below Saturn. Jupiter is the bright object setting in the northwest at far right. Arcturus is the bright star at top. Summer twilight lights the sky deep blue with some green airglow and perhaps dim reddish aurora at right. While it would have been lovely to have also had a train in the picture, as it entered the scene from other direction its headlights are so bright they flooded the scene with light (that’s what they are supposed do!) and would have made any photo a glare-filled mess! And taking a multi-segment pan with a train moving through the segments would not have produced anything more than a blur moving along the rail line. I shot this June 4, 2016. This is a stitch of 20 segments in 4 tiers of 5 panels each, with the 24mm lens at f/2.5 and Nikon D750 at ISO 5000, each for 20 seconds. Stitched with PTGui. And shot with the iOptron iPano motorized panning unit.
