HDR Chicago Bears Skyline...

Chicago Skyline Lights up for the Chicago Bears

This evening after a very freezing & bitter cold night of guiding public astronomical viewing at the Adler Planetarium as a Telescope Operator, I took time out to capture a rare photographic event with our skyline. Chicago is going nuts over the Chicago Bears going to the Super-bowl, (Over doing it really - get a life, eh?), But I wanted to record it, and this time I took the 3 bracketed shots to create a post HDR image.

As an astronomer you took this shot to complain about light pollution?
Sweet shot, I for one appreciate you getting cold.

The Irony!

It's amazing that even with this tremendous source of light pollution right off our front door step at the Adler Planetarium, we can still target celestial objects with modest equipment. Galaxies, Nebulae, star clusters...it's all there mocking the intense orange glow of Chicago's light pollution.

Thanks for the appreciation.

very nice work. On panoaramics you might want to crop the shot more to get rid of all that empty space (not hte reflection but at least some of the sky). It will enlarge your image and give more detail. Heres a shot of mine from the same place. 8 images merged together. http://www.pasphotogra​phy.com …o_Skyline_Poste​r_Copy.jpg (at night)
http://www.pasphotogra​phy.com …/CHI_Cityscape_​2_copy.jpg (daytime a few weeks ago)

Paul

i went out last night to get some shots of the city. i couldn't feel my toes. it was pretty damn cold. but it was worth it.

those are some very cool shots

Thanks for the comments.

No, I deceided to keep the sky above the skyline as it was on the HDR version. You can see from the original that some of the sky was cropped, but to have it just on the sklyline would have overpowered the image. It shows the light pollution glow drop off and keeping it small here for display keeps the loading time down.

It follows the 1/3's philosphy anyway, but is any image a poor one?

Nice pana of the skyline.

Sorry but what is HDR? I've seen some people talk of it.

Chicagoastronomer, So whats the best way to find out when the northern lights will be visible down this far again?

mishnogram wrote in post #2649652
Sorry but what is HDR? I've seen some people talk of it.

High Dynamic Range - is a specialist technique which can give hyperrealistic results or simply avoid loosing information in a high contrast scene beyond the capability of a normal sensor (digital or film).
It involves combining the same scene at two or more different exposures, by underexposing you capture details normally blown out and by over exposing to capture details lost in shadows.
ChicagoAstro has achieved a natural looking result which may not seem like HDR but notice how the sky fades from orange to deep blue (from an overexposed shot) and the colors of the lights have retained their full intensity (from an underexposed shot).

PAS,

Aurora activity is caused by large Coronal Mass Ejections and the resulting sunpots.

The best way to monitor sunspot activity is to visit spaceweather.com on a regular basis. There, notice will be provided when to expect a good display.

On the HDR process...

Max is correct,

I was intimidated by the HDR process and thought it was out of my reach when I first read about it. But with a simple basic free HDR program (FDR Tools), it's relatively easy. There are more sophisticated programs out there, but for now this is fine.

On this one of the skyline, I exposed three shots. With the Powershot S3, we have an option to bracket shots and I exposed them 2-/+ on each side of the normal exposure. As long as you keep the same perspective of the image using a tripod, it's almost foolproof.

Not too bad.

chicagoastronomer wrote in post #2652736
Max is correct,

Phew! Would hate to have got it wrong. Thanks.

Sounds similar to the technique of focus stacking used by macro photographers except it's exposure stacking. Whatever, the results are very impressive.

To me HDR looks better than a standard image for "most" low light landscapes like chicagoastronomer did. The image seems to pop more even if it is slighly surreal and almost looks fake as described by some. This is an HDR I took from North Ave. beach a few months back composed of 3 images merged with photomatix, 1 stop above and below. Its a very popular stock photo seller too.

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