The Zodiacal Light in the the late autumn evening sky from Arizona, overlooking the Chiricahua Mountains near Portal, AZ. The Zodiacal Light exends up from the horizon to the angled following the ecliptic. The summer Milky Way setting into the southwest extends up from the horizon to the right, running through the middle of the Summer Triangle stars. A satellite streaks across the Zodiacal Light, in a flaring path. I shot this from the field at Quailway Cottage. This is a stack of 7 x 2-minute exposures at f/2.8 with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens and Canon 6D at ISO 1250. All exposures were tracked on the iOptron Sky-Tracker. The ground came from one exposure to minimize blurring.
A panorama of roughly 180° showing a star- and planet-filled sky in the pre-dawn hours over Lake Annette in Jasper National Park, Alberta, on the morning of October 25, 2015. At left, to the east, are the two bright planets, Venus (brightest) and Jupiter in a close conjunction 1° apart (and here almost merging into one glow), plus reddish Mars below them, all in Leo, with the bright star Regulus above them. At centre, to the south, is Orion and Canis Major, with the bright star Sirius low in the south. At upper right are the stars of Taurus, including Aldebaran and the Pleiades star cluster. Venus was near greatest elongation on this morning. The Milky Way runs vertically at centre, between Sirius and Procyon, the bright star above centre. The faint glow of morning Zodiacal Light rises in a diagonal band at left in the east through the planets and stars of Leo and into Cancer and the Beehive Cluster at top left. No special filter was employed here — the hazy planets and stars and colourful star images comes naturally from a high haze over the sky this morning. It bloats the images of Venus and Jupiter so they almost merge. The stars are partly reflected in the waters with wind distorting some of the reflections. Some green airglow appears in the south as well. Distant Whistler peak below Orion is lit by lights from the Jasper Townsite. The site is the shore of Lake Annette near the Jasper Park Lodge and site to the annual star party held as part of the Jasper Dark Sky Festival. I shot this scene the morning after the 2015 Festival. This is a panorama of 12 segments, shot with the 24mm lens mounted vertically (portrait), each for 30 seconds at f/2.8 with the Canon 6D at ISO 3200. Stitched with Photoshop, with some vertical scaling to reduce the distortion introduced by the pan mapping process.
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.
