Milkyway nightscapes

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18109738
Thanks everyone.

Man I wish, New Zealand is definitely on the bucket list, some of the best night skies on the planet for sure. One of these days I'll have some money and time to travel down there, definitely would be a pleasure to shoot with Mr. Mack.

You guys would love it down here! Dark skies are so easy to get to

Visited Yosemite National Park this weekend. I always wanted to take a photograph like this.

OZS2KCA wrote in post #18110548
Visited Yosemite National Park this weekend. I always wanted to take a photograph like this.

Hosted photo: posted by OZS2KCA in
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forum: Astronomy & Celestial

Too bad that ugly Lexus is in the way

Another try

Recent shot I took of the night sky in Moravia, where part of the Milky Way is visible. Red light on the trees provide by fire. Any idea how to de-blur those edges? Changes to settings?

My brother still has a house on the north Island, I was going to visit but he decided to move to Wyoming for now. New Zealand has lots of great scenery besides the dark skies so I always wanted to go.

I went out to the mountains in western North Carolina this past weekend, and finally had a couple of nights in fairly dark conditions. This was only the second time I've been able to shoot the Milky Way.

This was literally shot on the side of the highway - Route 28 heading towards Fontana, NC. There was a parking area overlooking a valley, and turning around, I saw the Milky Way over the hill.

davidmtml wrote in post #18111988
A question for those who have shot panoramas of the MW...do you stitch them together manually, or do you use Photoshop or other software? I tried a pano, 12 shots worth, and let PS combine them. This is what I ended up with, I know it's not supposed to have two "tails" on the right side, not sure what what happened there.

I do 95% of my panoramas in Lightroom, since the newer versions can create a pano that is still a RAW image. If Lightroom can't stitch it correctly though, I use Microsoft ICE! http://research.micros​oft.com …/um/redmond/pro​jects/ice/

It's completely free, and seriously has never mis-stitched(?) an image for me!

Thanks, David! I'll check out ICE.

Well, it took about two minutes to download ICE, and maybe 5 minutes, if that, to create a panorama with it. I still need to work on this stuff, but ICE looks like a great way to create panos. Thanks again!

ICE is definitely a good free program for Milky Way stitching, you'll get better results if you load up your shots and correct the vignetting, dark levels, add some contrast and sharpening, and try to match the histograms from shot to shot, then export each shot as a 16-bit tiff and stitch with ICE.

I've long wanted to try out tilt shift for nightscape photography, but tilt shift lenses are really damn expensive and aren't great for low light photography generally. So I decided to give the effect a try through post processing on the last Milky Way shot I took since it looks down on to a meadow with lots of trees and campers and stuff. Kind of an interesting effect.

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/Lyg6​Su

pdxbenedetti wrote in post #18112068
ICE is definitely a good free program for Milky Way stitching, you'll get better results if you load up your shots and correct the vignetting, dark levels, add some contrast and sharpening, and try to match the histograms from shot to shot, then export each shot as a 16-bit tiff and stitch with ICE.

Thanks, Eric! As I said, I just took a quick look at ICE, I'll need to spend some time with it and get to learn it.

Just a couple to say I did it.

drlane wrote in post #18112128
Just a couple to say I did it.

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forum: Astronomy & Celestial

Hosted photo: posted by drlane in
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forum: Astronomy & Celestial

Absolutely gorgeous. I already follow you on FB. Love your work!

Thanks Troy good to see a fan I really like you M45 Lum image.