Milkyway nightscapes

Black and white Milky Way nightscapes aren't common, unfortunately I overexposed the hell out of the tree and blew out the highlights, which made made layering in the sky shot I took with the skytracker turned on nearly impossible. I tried repeatedly to get it to align and look properly in color, but the bad exposure of the tree just made it impossible. So I converted the images to black and white and then pain stakingly brushed in the tree branches back into the picture to reduce the blown highlights as much as possible. Still not great, but at least I was able to get some picture salvaged from it.

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #17971878
Black and white Milky Way nightscapes aren't common, unfortunately I overexposed the hell out of the tree and blew out the highlights, which made made layering in the sky shot I took with the skytracker turned on nearly impossible. I tried repeatedly to get it to align and look properly in color, but the bad exposure of the tree just made it impossible. So I converted the images to black and white and then pain stakingly brushed in the tree branches back into the picture to reduce the blown highlights as much as possible. Still not great, but at least I was able to get some picture salvaged from it.

Looks pretty cool!

Eric I think it is a striking and powerful image.

I was kinda in the same boat for this shot, please advice on what you might have done.
The tree is lit by a gigantic street light 20 feet up a pole. I tried to talk the better-half into throwing a rock
and breaking it !! She could never have hit it though

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/vBEJ​Fx

MedicineMan4040 wrote in post #17973446
Eric I think it is a striking and powerful image.

I was kinda in the same boat for this shot, please advice on what you might have done.
The tree is lit by a gigantic street light 20 feet up a pole. I tried to talk the better-half into throwing a rock
and breaking it !! She could never have hit it though

Why is there a street light in the middle of the bayou?

It was a boat ramp on the Mississippi River and it was a freaking huge light.

Cool. Looks like a place you need an air boat or bass boat to get to

Yep it's got that cypress swamp look.
Well that pic was a ways back in time.
I cringe looking at it but is what it is.

IMO those are the hardest shots to image and edit, especially with trees and branch gaps. I'd say take a good exposure of the foreground and a good exposure of the sky and try to merge them, if you do it right the foreground exposure histogram might actually be similar to the sky shot histogram. Mask the foreground exposure and layer it over the sky shot.

In terms of salvaging that particular shot, in photoshop you can select and mask the foreground elements and edit it separately from the sky, I'd try and do that. It'll be tricky though, just as my tree shot was.

Went out to the salt flats west of salt lake to do some imaging and experimenting last night. Only had an hour of dark skies after the moon set, so I practiced some light painting stuff and star trail ideas I had while the moon was up. After it set I tried to collect as many images as possible for panos, one set with my Nikon D600 and Tokina 11-16mm lens and one set with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm lens. I want to see if I can get as good as image quality with that Tokina lens on the skytracker mount compared to the Rokinon. Unfortunately the Milky Way was already really high in the sky which is making stitching hard.

Also tried a bit of HDR stacking with my 50mm lens, did two sets of exposures of the core area, each set includes a 5 minute, 4 minute, 3 minute, 2 minute, and 1 minute exposure. Actually worked quite well, got quite a bit of detail out of just 15 minutes worth of exposure. While the moon was up I snagged some zoom shots of the mountains around the flats and decided to create another surreal image with the stacked 50mm shots:

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #17974410
IMO those are the hardest shots to image and edit, especially with trees and branch gaps. I'd say take a good exposure of the foreground and a good exposure of the sky and try to merge them, if you do it right the foreground exposure histogram might actually be similar to the sky shot histogram. Mask the foreground exposure and layer it over the sky shot.

In terms of salvaging that particular shot, in photoshop you can select and mask the foreground elements and edit it separately from the sky, I'd try and do that. It'll be tricky though, just as my tree shot was.

Went out to the salt flats west of salt lake to do some imaging and experimenting last night. Only had an hour of dark skies after the moon set, so I practiced some light painting stuff and star trail ideas I had while the moon was up. After it set I tried to collect as many images as possible for panos, one set with my Nikon D600 and Tokina 11-16mm lens and one set with my Nikon D600 and Rokinon 24mm lens. I want to see if I can get as good as image quality with that Tokina lens on the skytracker mount compared to the Rokinon. Unfortunately the Milky Way was already really high in the sky which is making stitching hard.

Also tried a bit of HDR stacking with my 50mm lens, did two sets of exposures of the core area, each set includes a 5 minute, 4 minute, 3 minute, 2 minute, and 1 minute exposure. Actually worked quite well, got quite a bit of detail out of just 15 minutes worth of exposure. While the moon was up I snagged some zoom shots of the mountains around the flats and decided to create another surreal image with the stacked 50mm shots:

I would fix the blue tint on the mountains on the right, looks odd. Then a bit of noise reduction and it would look like one of the best images ive ever seen of the MW!

Outstanding work. I dream of such dark places...

Thanks for noticing that blue tint on the mountains, thought I had corrected for the bright moonlight, but my brain was pretty much mushified yesterday after staying up all night imaging. I updated the picture, got rid of some of that blue tint, it's hard with such a bright moon though.

I'm always hesitant to apply too much noise reduction on stacked shots because you can start clipping stars pretty easily. This picture is so high resolution it probably won't matter too much, but on lower resolution widefield images I usually only apply small amounts.

It's interesting actually, I'd consider this area a poor place to take shots, you look into the very bright light pollution of Salt Lake City (which is nearly 120 miles away, but very evident as you can see in this pano) and behind you to the west is the smallish city of Wendover, Utah/Nevada that's only 10 miles away (but has a lot of bright lights/light pollution density). As much as I like the geography and foreground scenery of shooting there I probably won't make the long drive unless I can shoot more lightning storms, which is a cool setting. Here's a pano I put together from my trip:

You want to be very careful applying Denoise to any MW image cause it might soften out dim stars .

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #17974829
Thanks for noticing that blue tint on the mountains, thought I had corrected for the bright moonlight, but my brain was pretty much mushified yesterday after staying up all night imaging. I updated the picture, got rid of some of that blue tint, it's hard with such a bright moon though.

I'm always hesitant to apply too much noise reduction on stacked shots because you can start clipping stars pretty easily. This picture is so high resolution it probably won't matter too much, but on lower resolution widefield images I usually only apply small amounts.

It's interesting actually, I'd consider this area a poor place to take shots, you look into the very bright light pollution of Salt Lake City (which is nearly 120 miles away, but very evident as you can see in this pano) and behind you to the west is the smallish city of Wendover, Utah/Nevada that's only 10 miles away (but has a lot of bright lights/light pollution density). As much as I like the geography and foreground scenery of shooting there I probably won't make the long drive unless I can shoot more lightning storms, which is a cool setting. Here's a pano I put together from my trip:

Really gives you an idea of how bright the light pollution from Salt Lake is even though it's quite a ways a way, and the brightness on the right side of the image is caused by the light pollution from that small city.

Last summer I got to see a really cool lightning storm out there:

Nonetheless its a superb picture. What did you use to stack them?

davidfarina wrote in post #17974887
Nonetheless its a superb picture. What did you use to stack them?

I use PixInsight, I've used Photoshop and Deep Sky Stacker as well, but I find PixInsight to be the best now.

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #17974910
I use PixInsight, I've used Photoshop and Deep Sky Stacker as well, but I find PixInsight to be the best now.

Is that available for Mac?

Mac, Linux, and Windows. I use on Mac.

The user interface is identical on all platforms because they create their own interface environment (it doesn't look native to the OS). Getting to learn to use it can be confusing but once you get used to it, it becomes easier and easier to learn new parts of the program.

It does have a bit of a learning curve (it's not obvious what you should do when using it.)

The IP4AP.com site is well-known among Pixinsight users for their tutorials.