Sunrise/sunset/sky photos thread

LanceMac10

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Shouldn't take you too long to shoot over to the end of Academy for a sunrise shot of Pike's Peak....early morning light really makes you believe "Purple Mountain Majesty"
the foothills really look purple....:D:D:D:D:D:D Stood in the parking lot of the Academy hotel every morning when I was out there, spliff in hand.....I'm an early riser.


You don't have to get the shot.....it's ingrained.o_O;):D:D:D:D:D:D
 

Starfox

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So last night I set the camera up to try and catch some Geminid meteors, unfortunately I didn't get any on camera although I did see a couple. The 50mm lens is not really wide enough so you have to get lucky, I thought I would point towards Orion as that is slightly off the radiant and some meteors may shoot off in that direction.
Any way I digress... thought some may be interested in seeing what I got and a rough explanation of how I did it.

To start with this is a single shot 30 second exposure with an iso of 400 and aperture closed a touch to 3.5 ....
IMG_4992.JPG
Now that is coolish, sort of but not really. You can still faintly see the blooming of M42 the Orion nebula but there is nothing extraordinary here.
What you do need is more data, now I could of changed my settings for a longer shot but the light pollution has a shitty effect on night photos.

For example take this pic, I used the same ISO but the aperture was fully open at 1.8 and well you can see how much more orange the sky is and even a glare streak from a street light.

IMG_4985.JPG
The settings in the first pic are better.

So what comes next?
Well I set the camera on autoshoot and when inside and played Battlefront for a bit.
140 frames and just over 2 hours later I went back out and put the lens cap on and took another run of dark images which helps for noise reduction. I fell asleep at this point and brought the camera in in the morning.

Now I have a whole lot more data and thankfully a bunch of software exists to process it and get the most out of my images. So I load up all of my pics in a stacking program and about an hour later it churns out a stacked image for me to play with in photoshop. I make some initial tweaks in the stacking software, mainly aligning the RGB a bit and I get this.....

aa.jpg

This is more interesting for sure but it can be improved somewhat, the gradient from the light pollution does not help matters and there is hidden detail in there so in photoshop I run a plugin to kill the gradient and I fiddle with the curves and levels and eventually it spits out this....

aaaddd.jpg

Muuuch better!

Not perfect by any means but from humble beginnings in the first pic to the final pic it is pretty cool from a light polluted back yard.

The meteor shower peaks tonight so weather permitting I'll give it another crack, not sure weather to gamble with Orion again for that one meteor streak which would make a cooler pic or to focus on Gemini or to turn tracking off altogether. I'll think of something.
 

CamdenJim

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So last night I set the camera up to try and catch some Geminid meteors,

...

Not perfect by any means but from humble beginnings in the first pic to the final pic it is pretty cool from a light polluted back yard.

These photos are great, and I really enjoyed your walk-through of how you got the final image. That one looks like the night sky I saw in the 50s "down on the farm."
 

Starfox

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Thanks, I was a bit bored and wanted to share. Yeah I totally wish I had a camera back in the day, some of the spots we went the sky was amazing. If you can find a spot away from the light it makes such a big difference to the pictures and you can get away with taking just the one exposure and very little processing.

I do have a filter for light pollution but I don't use it when trying for meteors, I might try another night with that in and experiment some and post the results if they are interesting.
 

Starfox

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And here is the same region of sky but with 200 odd stacked images. This section of sky stretches between the constellations Auriga and Perseus and they sit pretty much in the Milky Way which is why it is such a rich star field. The bright star is Capella and that tuft of red on the right is the California nebula. There are some weird artifacts in the top right too, either that or space and time has warped.

Weather is not looking so great for tonight but if it clears I'll have another crack at something.

aa.jpg
 
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