Milkyway nightscapes

Nice! Very serene.

markesc wrote in post #18416193
Decided to put the half moon phase to work to light up the mt + cars, single shot:

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I like it a lot!

TRhoads wrote in post #18416184
Really impressive image result from the EOS M.

A couple of questions for you...

1:
Have you had the chance to use the Nisi filter for shooting the MW yet? I have the Lonely Speck Pure night, and am not 100% sold on it. It seems like it just puts a really strong color cast on the image, and then when I edit the image, it ends up with some of the yellow back in it that was originally taken out.

Thanks. I'm really surprised at the results from the EOS M6 with that tiny, inexpensive little lens. And no filter was used for that shot. I have only had the camera for a short while. The new DPAF sensor is fairly sensitive in low light compared to the EOS-M... but they are both very similar cameras. The images are smoother from the M6 although i DID take these pictures in RAW... something I never do. The NiSi Natural Night Filter I bought comes in two thread sizes plus several sheet sizes for drop-in filter holders. I bought the 77mm threaded version so I've ONLY used it on my 24mmL lens from Canon. I contacted NiSi and asked them what White Balance setting would be best suited for the filter and they recommended a Daylight WB of around 5000 Kelvin. The shot of my camera on the tripod was taken at around 5000 Kelvin (WB). I originally thought that the tint in the filter might block too much light - but no, it still catches the Milky Way in other shots virtually identical the the Tungsten WB shot from the EOS M6. The shot below was my first Milky Way test with this NiSi filter... so I had the WB set to 3500 Kelvin by mistake...but the violet tint looks interesting.

I find that different scenes with the NiSi filter offer very different results. The first time I tested it was with a full moon next to a building at night and the results were fascinating. The light from the windows looked much more natural. The sky was a violet color but it looked both neat and attractive. This filter was designed for city landscape shooting and was designed to protect the green spectrum whilst removing yellow sodium street lamp light from the air where it acts as light pollution. I saw a picture on Facebook taken with one a few weeks ago and had to try one out. Here's the original image that caught my eye on Facebook that inspired me to look into this filter. In my opinion, the saturation and color MAY have been tweaked slightly in the area of the Galactic Core... Facebook Link (public page) Via: https://www.facebook.c​om …6915233/1442407​159183604/

TRhoads wrote in post #18416184
2:
How do you pull those dust lane details out of that image, that is awesome.

I very applied an 'overlay' layer in Photoshop with a 50% grey fill and then slowly worked on darkening the darks and brightening the lighter regions with both the 'dodge' and 'burn' tools. I did not layer any new details in. The details were captured in the single exposure... and so I wasn't adding new information, just teasing out the embedded detail. The light/dark adjustments took about 3 hours with a Wacom pen. Then I reduced the opacity to reduce the strength of the effect. The original RAW mage looks almost identical but slightly 'flatter'. Some of the details it caught (really fine filaments) really impressed me. I did not expect to see them. Before I started, I had to compare the details with professional shots from observatories to see if the structures were real or imagined. Some of the lines in the dust lanes were so fine and symmetrical that I thought it might have been a glitch during the recording of the image. But that's what it looks like apparently.

Thanks!

Was going to do a time lapse there, but just too much oncoming traffic headlight glare...

Big Dipper and Mt. Hood:

nero_design wrote in post #18416147

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[ABOVE image] Taken with the EOS 6D + EF 24mm f/1.4L USM II lens and a 77mm NiSi Natural Night Filter.

We've had some cold but VERY clear skies here in Sydney (Australia) this last week. I took the opportunity to drive to my favorite lookout - which is situated 1,625 feet above sea level... high enough to be above a good portion of the city smog. In fact you can see the haze layer way down below whenever you visit this spot, even at night. I took a picture of the camera I was using while waiting for the sky to darken enough to see the Milky Way. Right now (July), the Galactic Core of the Milky Way is directly overhead at around 8pm and the sun sets at around 5pm. The lilac-tint on the first image is from using a 77mm NiSi Natural Night Filter - which was designed to filter out the yellow hues from Sodium Street Lights at night. Whilst it makes for amazing skies, I did not use this filter for the Milky Way shot from the EOS-M6 camera because I need a step-down filter ring for mounting it to the much smaller lens.

I took the second image (of the core of the Milky Way... see below) with the relatively tiny Canon EOS M6 Mirrorless camera... and whilst I had an array of lenses to chose from, I opted to use the very inexpensive EF-M 22mm f/2.0 STM lens. This lens was selling for just $99 in the United States at one point... but demand and newer EOS-M camera releases have driven the price back to it's RRP of around $199... which is still pretty awesome. I had to tease out some of the finer details during editing, but the results were surprisingly good. I chose a Tungsten WB because I've found that it seems to enhance the nebulous-red areas of the star-forming regions of the Milky Way. No filter used. Color-sampling from the captured image enabled me to enhance the colors slightly. I took the liberty of adding some diffraction spikes to Saturn - which was crossing the Milky Way at the time (see the bright blue "star" near the darkest dustlane). I took both of these images in RAW for a change. This is also the first time I've used RAW since 2004.

DETAILS: Single RAW exposure at 22mm @ f/2.2 @ 20 seconds @ ISO 2000. 2-second built-in self timer used.

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[ABOVE image] The resulting image taken with the EOS M6 Mirrorless camera + EF-M 22mm f/2.0 STM lens

I guarantee you that if you set a proper/natural white balance (~5000k) you will pull a TON more color detail out of that shot. The tungsten white balance is completely masking the strong h-alpha reds and the yellows/blues in the Rho Ophiuchi complex. You also can't resolve the Lagoon Nebula, Omega Nebula, and Eagle Nebula pink hues at all. Give this a read for pulling more color and doing natural color balancing:

http://www.clarkvision​.com …ography.image.p​rocessing/

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18416778
I guarantee you that if you set a proper/natural white balance (~5000k) you will pull a TON more color detail out of that shot. The tungsten white balance is completely masking the strong h-alpha reds and the yellows/blues in the Rho Ophiuchi complex. You also can't resolve the Lagoon Nebula, Omega Nebula, and Eagle Nebula pink hues at all. Give this a read for pulling more color and doing natural color balancing:

http://www.clarkvision​.com …ography.image.p​rocessing/

Thank you for the link. I think his explanations are methodical and precise. Roger and I disagreed with the way images of the Milky Way are captured and processed once before. He's very passionate about the subject but, as I pointed out to him - our view of the universe is limited by our color spectrum range. This is why NASA publishes false-color-images taken of our planets and even deep space objects. An infrared or gamma view of the Milky Way yields the same details in different ways. And he would be right in asserting that I am not capturing details in infrared or gamma by using Tungsten WB. The GOOD thing about having shot that image in RAW is that after seeing your post, it occured to me that I should revisit the RAW image and then alter the recorded image to view it in Daylight WB... which reveals a much more 'normal' brown-yellow color palate. I've started to play with the image more to see if I can see more details (as you suggested) although it does look less visually engaging. Allow me some time to play with the image more (I tried as best to follow Roger's method with the software that I have access to) and if it looks acceptable I'll post a JPEG here.

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Yep, crazy. F4 and a super-zoom at 12mm.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/XajG​V8

MedicineMan4040 wrote in post #18417907
Yep, crazy. F4 and a super-zoom at 12mm.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/XajG​V8 Milky Way N. Wilksborough 12-24mm at 12mm by MedicineMan4040, on Flickr

Looks like you're putting that A9 through its paces.

The Palm Desert area's light pollution is becoming a problem for the North side of the Joshua Tree park.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/WtNx​zY

Love the form of the clouds at the bottom of the Milky Way on this one. First time I tried Photoshop to edit it, before some more edits in Lightroom.

We let this american car drive us to watch the stars.

Canon 6D + Samyang 24mm f/1.4 ED AS IF UMC + Fotopro MGA-684N
24mm | f/2.8 | 20sec. | ISO3200

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/Xahj​fo

Death Valley

nero_design wrote in post #18416973
I once posted this picture that I had captured in Tungsten WB of the Milky Way over a cliffside in front of my parents house... where I was able to retain more interesting colors from city lights reflecting off low clouds and I tweaked the Milky Way to enhance the tonal range - resulting in a Sapphire-Blue band of stars ...which I liked immensely. Roger didn't. Now I appreciate his perspective on this... and that it doesn't necessarily reflect the natural or correct hue of the Milky Way. This Sapphire Blue color came about by sheer accident when I was duplicating layers and inadvertently changed the properties by mistake. I liked the results because it looked fantasy-like. There was no nebulous color from the starforming regions but I really do like this image, even though Roger disproved.

What it does do is evoke an emotional response from many of us who grew up with children's books that depicted the night sky as blue instead of black. They say that this is the difference between a regular 'photograph' and 'art'. And this image is more arty than faithful because of the saturated blues. By romanticizing the view, the photograph can become something much more. Just as the great photographers like Amsel Adams spent hours tweaking their photographs in a dark-room by dodging and burning the highlights into an image prior to printing, we can use computers to tweak and alter our image to better meet something that might please our eyes. I'm an illustrator and artist (NASA have been my client on occasion but I worked in Hollywood for years on Sci-Fi films), and I have a deep admiration for space exploration. Normally have a preference for purity in photography where I believe that excessive reveals in Dynamic Range are really the result of bad exposure techniques. Camera phones today (eg iPhone 7s) can generate fake and fully synthetic Bokeh. It's not real but it looks good to the eye - so everybody wants to use this feature. Which means less of the scene captured is real.

Roger's webpage showed an example of Tungsten WB that was pretty awful. I can't blame him for despising such images - It was completely devoid on any other hue other than teal-blue. I've seen some images of the Milky Way that won local Awards here in Sydney... images that were bright orange and purple. They were colored and then massively processed in Photoshop during editing - but the judges didn't seem to know or care.

SIDE-NOTE: That cliff at the bottom of the picture is known as 'The Skillion' (at Terrigal, NSW Australia). I was there in November 20, 2016 to try and capture the sunset from the high point ... but police had blocked access to it and refused to tell me why. So I fitted a 400mm lens to see what the problem was. A man jumped from the cliff as I watched. He was killed when he struck the rocks below. Later I spoke with locals about it and they said he'd been diagnosed with Alzheimers and was distressed at the time that he took his life. The picture I took now reminds me of this whenever I look at it. After more research, it seems that The Skillion is so popular as a suicide location that local council attempted to dynamite it three times in recent years... without success.

I think a photograph can be both natural and artful, the colors don't have to be the dull/bland orange without contrast, saturation, or interesting and colorful aspects, you can get emotional and awe-drawing responses from someone by using a very natural color balance....and at the same time know that you are presenting an image that is as accurate as we can make it to be. I've had several conversations with Roger, I've even gone the rounds with him over processing of DSO/pure astrophotography images (I disagree with his post-processing philosophy when it comes to DSO editing), but I agree with him regarding widefield/nightscape color balance. I posted this shot earlier in this thread, it's one I took over Memorial Day weekend when the surprise aurora reached quite far south (here in the Northern Hemisphere), it's processed with a natural color balance so you can appreciate what are the accurate aspects of the night sky and it was shot with an unmodified camera. The aurora adds some beautiful pinks/oranges/yellows/​purples to the left, you can clearly see the h-alpha signal from the North America nebula and Sadr Region in the middle/left of the sky (and if you look close you can even see the Eastern and Western Veil nebula), you can see the pinks of the Eagle, Omega, and Lagoon Nebula, the nice blues and yellows in the Rho Ophiuchi Complex, and obviously the bright banded red and green airglow throughout.

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18419598
I think a photograph can be both natural and artful, the colors don't have to be the dull/bland orange without contrast, saturation, or interesting and colorful aspects, you can get emotional and awe-drawing responses from someone by using a very natural color balance....and at the same time know that you are presenting an image that is as accurate as we can make it to be. I've had several conversations with Roger, I've even gone the rounds with him over processing of DSO/pure astrophotography images (I disagree with his post-processing philosophy when it comes to DSO editing), but I agree with him regarding widefield/nightscape color balance. I posted this shot earlier in this thread, it's one I took over Memorial Day weekend when the surprise aurora reached quite far south (here in the Northern Hemisphere), it's processed with a natural color balance so you can appreciate what are the accurate aspects of the night sky and it was shot with an unmodified camera. The aurora adds some beautiful pinks/oranges/yellows/​purples to the left, you can clearly see the h-alpha signal from the North America nebula and Sadr Region in the middle/left of the sky (and if you look close you can even see the Eastern and Western Veil nebula), you can see the pinks of the Eagle, Omega, and Lagoon Nebula, the nice blues and yellows in the Rho Ophiuchi Complex, and obviously the bright banded red and green airglow throughout.

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Land of the Yankee Fork by Eric, on Flickr

The way I look at it is the vast majority of the world's population lives in urban centers where it is impossible to see the Milky Way, so when people happen upon (or seek out) shots of the Milky Way and the night sky they should be presented an image that is accurate as possible. You mention NASA using false colored images, this is done for scientific means so as to analyze data in a way that can maximize results (fwiw I'm a stem cell researcher and I have to analyze a ton of data from experiments), in the case of IR or UV or microwave or X-ray they have to assign colors because those emissions fall outside the visible spectrum of light, without assigning a color the data is meaningless because we can't put it in a visual format that can be analyzed with our own eyes. But cameras don't deal with that issue (assuming you're not shooting in IR), we deal with the visible light spectrum when imaging with a DSLR.

As you can see the image is not showing......