I left my house in Bozeman, Montana at 3 a.m. this morning to go photograph the Milky Way at a reservoir south of town. In the summertime, there are probably upwards of a thousand people in this drainage. Not this morning though! I did not see another soul until I was back down the road a few miles. I captured several images at a couple of locations. I was racing Astronomical twilight, which is when the upper atmosphere begins to be illuminated by the distant rising sun. I had enough time to stop by one more spot. Right about then, the Aurora Borealis flared up and photobombed the northern end of the Milky Way arch. The rest of this new moon cycle looks pretty stormy. This might be the last Milky Way image until around April’s New Moon.
Type of Critique Requested
Aesthetic: Feedback on the overall visual appeal of the image, including its color, lighting, cropping, and composition.
Conceptual: Feedback on the message and story conveyed by the image.
Emotional: Feedback on the emotional impact and artistic value of the image.
Technical: Feedback on the technical aspects of the image, such as exposure, color, focus and reproduction of colors and details, post-processing, and print quality.
Specific Feedback and Self-Critique
One drawback to stacking for noise reduction is that you lose the columns in the Northern Lights. The foreground is fairly illuminated by the light pollution from Bozeman and the way it was reflecting off the clouds on the left side. This also affects the tone to the sky. I’ve tried to keep it from appearing too blue while lightening it enough to enhance the core of the Milky Way. This is a new lens to me and it seems like I am still getting some star trailing even at an exposure time that should not do that.
Technical Details
This is a panorama of 7 images. Nikon D850, Sigma Art 13-24 f/2.8, ISO 6400, f/2.8, 15 seconds, 14mm. Each image is stacked for noise reduction in Starry Landscape Stacker. I used 10 lights and 10 darks uploaded into SLS as RAW images. The resulting images were then uploaded into Lightroom and then merged into a pano. I used masks on the foreground and the sky to bring out the elements in each one that I wanted to highlight. I also use the Ministars action in Photoshop to reduce the appearance of the stars and to really bring out the core of the MW. The finished jpeg is 122 mb but this one is reduced to 2048 pixels on the long side. Couldn’t get anything larger to upload.
It looks quite good, but not a lot of detail can be seen at the size posted. I like the composition and the moonlight is a nice touch. Too bad about losing detail on the aurora. Maybe better to abandon the idea of a stacked pano and go for the rare aurora? Was it better to do the stacking compared to modern NR methods? A little more info about camera, lens and shutter speeds would help.
When doing a wide pano, you need to position the camera/lens on a nodal slider so the “entrance pupil” of the lens is over the center of rotation, and have the lens axis aimed exactly level, to get a level horizon with no distortion and no parallax errors. Lots of info online how to find that point for a lens.
Thanks Diane. I have messed around with a pano of single images and used Topaz to remove noise, but it didnt really do it justice. I’ll play with that some more. I don’t usually have too much trouble with panos, but I was having tripod troubles! The day before I had been shooting ice structures in a stream and had the tripod right in the water. It was 5ºf as I was shooting the Milky Way and legs froze up and I couldnt get the head perfectly level. I use an L bracket and had the camera vertical and centered pretty well on the center of rotation, but I am sure a nodal slider would work better. A lot of my panos require a bit of a walk, so I have adapted to doing it this way. I totally forgot to add exif data! I’ll edit that right now!
Cold makes things difficult, for sure! I just looked at your portfolio and found I had missed most of your earlier posts. (I let myself get too busy…) Will catch up with them tomorrow.
Hi Terry,
that looks really beautiful. Aurora and Milky Way in one Panorama! What more could you want?
I agree with @Diane_Miller that you can’t see much detail in the downsized image you posted. Could it be that you have the star trails only at the edges of the single frames? Maybe you should try to close the aperture a bit next time.
That is definitely the problem with my 16-35 F2.8. It tends to have some weird aberrations at the edges when I shoot at 2.8.
Stars are a major challenge for all but a few new lenses, especially wide angles. @Jens_Ober, what system are you using? My Canon 16-35 II f/2.8 is horrible in the corners, even for daylight shooting. The 17mm tilt-shift is a little better. And stopping down doesn’t help a lot, with my copies – bought new and treated like babies. I’ve heard the Sigma 28mm f/1.4 Art is about the best for Canon bodies, but needs to be stopped down a little for the best results. Then you have to do pano stitching if you want a wide-angle view. If we ever get a clear night I’ll rent one to try it. Where I live, it’s a long way to any decent view of the Milky Way. I’ll try a run in summer and take the tracker if I can figure a good way to mount the camera lens on it. Would need to mount the R5, too, as the astro camera (ZWO 2600) is an APS-C sensor size.
Thanks for the replies you two! I’ve added a single image to the post. This is one image before stacking. The stars are very slight dashes…it’s possible that my exposure time is too long, but at 15 seconds it should be good, even with the NPF rule for larger sensors. There is a tiny bit of CA in the corners, but not much distortion. I might be able to stop down 1 stop, but that might also make the image too noisy. I’ll give it a try! I have noticed that Starry Landscape Stacker has been leaving a few satellites in the stacks too. That never happened with the Sigma Art 20mm that I have shot with the last few years. Maybe there is a profile problem with this lens in SLS? I’ve been uploading RAWs into SLS, but maybe I need try TIFFs with this lens and see if it works any differently. Another possible culprit I suppose could be the direction in which I panned. I always shoot right to left for the Milky Way Panos, but this time in order to not loose the Aurora, I started there and worked to the right. Not sure if star movement from image to image is affected when shooting this way?
This is the same as here. It’s at least a two hours drive for me.
In the center of the image, the stars look fine to me. But at the very top, it starts to get a bit blurry and it looks like there are some coma aberrations.
So in my opinion your exposure time is fine.
Wide angle lenses for star photography are so frustrating. Looking at a bunch of reviews, it looks like my Canon 17mm f/4 TS-E can’t be significantly improved on. Sony seems to have better options in their new lenses, along with some new Sigma mirrorless lenses that can’t be adapted to Canon.
I think there might have been something to using Tiff instead of Nikon’s RAW images to upload to Starry Landscape Stacker. This one seems to be much better, not to mention the fact that it let me upload a higher res jpeg for this one. I darkened it up a bit. This version also seems to almost show some columns. I also changed the dimensions a bit.
What a grand scene Paul, and man that’s a job to create that!
In my experience, the nodal point is less significant when your subject is all fairly distant; I normally only have to worry about parallax if I have really close and really far subjects in the same image.
Color is so subjective, but my eye expects the snow to be a little less green. Here’s a comparison shifted slightly to magenta.
Thanks John! I tweaked the green tone a little bit. I don’t see it on the image straight off my computer, but I do see it in the image on this site. I slightly warmed the foreground and slid the tint to the magenta side ever so slightly.
