During our 2023 Fall Photo tour of SW Colorado my wife and I spent several days at Mesa Verde National Park. One of my goals for this trip was to capture the Fall Milky Way over some Anasazi ruins in the park. After some intensive searching I located this ruin not far from the main park road. I did 2 or 3 different shots previous to this one and then I moved my tripod so that the tree would be silhouetted by the Milky Way. As I did these shots I couldn’t help but wonder what the ancient Anasazi man thought as he watched the Milky Way march across the night sky.
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This is a set of 10 images stitched together to make this panoramic view. It was shot using Canon R5 and a Rokinon 14mm manual lens. f/2.8, 20 sec., ISO6400. Preprocessing was done with Adobe Camera Raw. Stitching with PTGui Pro and post processing with Photoshop.
John: Great attention to detail in the placement of the tree especially. The colors here are not as compelling as your first image but the scene and the Milky Way are still terrific. Most excellent. >=))>
John, the tree at the base of the Milkyway is a nice touch. Comparing this view to your previous post, the sky looks very green. In my limited night photography efforts, I always struggle with the color balance. (In fact, I often to go back and rebalance years later…) How do you choose?
The green in this photo is a phenomenon known as Air Glow. It is caused by ionized layers in the upper atmosphere. There are several ionized layers of the upper atmosphere and depending on which layer/s are energized you will get different colors. Longer daylight hours and warm weather tends to have more Air Glow. The evening I shoot this photo was a very pleasantly warm early October evening.
In the previous post there was not much Air Glow but some high level clouds and possibly smoke from fires in California that was still being illuminated by sun even though it had sat close to an hour before. That same high level cloud /smoke layer is also illuminated by light pollution from the town of Kayenta, AZ, visible above the horizon middle left.
While I haven’t done a ton on night photos, I have done quite a few and I find that no two nights come out the same. The sky colors are almost always different. Especially at different seasons of the year. In the winter you rarely have Air Glow because of the shorter days.
As far as color balance for night photography I always use the Landscape Profile and Daylight White Balance setting in Adobe Camera RAW. I know some nightscape photographers love to play with the color balance and various filters to create dramatic unnatural night sky colors. I prefer to try to keep the colors as natural as possible. With my Canon camera I push Vibrance and Saturation to about +12 to compensate for Canons tendency to have somewhat flat colors. Also for night photos I will apply about +20 on the Haze filter in ACR.
John, thanks for the info, including the interesting idea about the Haze filter. I’ve done a sky selection and added contrast (using a curves layer in PS), which gives hsa similar effect on the sky. We saw both green and red airglow during David Kingham’s Night Photography Workshop a couple of years ago, but both colors were quite streaky and didn’t extend nearly as high in the sky as what you have here. The Wikipedia description does pretty well in terms of describing both the history and the science behind airglow. My optical physics training has me wanting to get a colorimeter, but the scientific grade one that B&H offers is more than 10K, so I’m not about to buy it… and test my “theory”.
and test my “theory”.