July 2016 – The Amazing Sky

July 29, 2016July 30, 2016

Moon and Star Conjunction

Moon and Aldebaran (July 29, 2016)

The waning Moon shone near the bright star Aldebaran in the dawn sky.

This was a beautiful sight this morning, before dawn on July 29. The crescent Moon, its night side illuminated by Earthshine, shone just below the brightest star in Taurus.

We are currently in 3-year period when the Moon’s path is taking it near or in front of Aldebaran every month. However, most of these occultations or conjunctions are not well-timed for any particular location. And many involve the too-brilliant gibbous or full Moon.

But this morning the timing and Moon phase were perfect. From my longitude on Earth in Alberta, the Moon passed closest to the star just before the sky was getting too bright with dawn. Having them set against the deep blue twilight was perfect.

From farther east the Moon would not have appeared as close to Aldebaran as this before sunrise. From farther west the Moon and star would have appeared much lower in the sky at closest approach.

TECHNICAL:

For this image I shot 6 exposures, from 2 seconds for the Earthshine, twilight sky colour and stars, to 1/125th second for the bright crescent. I then stacked, aligned, and blended them together using luminosity masks – masks that hide or reveal parts of the image based on the brightness of the scene. You can see them in the Photoshop screen shot – Click on the image to enlarge it.

How do you create these masks?

• Turn off all the layers except the one you want to create a mask for.

• Go to Channels and Command/Control Click on the RGB Channel.

• That automatically selects all the highlights.

• Go back to the image layer and then hit the Add Mask button down at the bottom of the Layers panel (the rectangle with the black dot in it).

• Done. Repeat that for each image layer.

More traditional high dynamic range or “HDR” stacking left odd colour fringing artifacts and double images on the slowly moving Moon, despite applying what is called “de-ghosting” and despite using a mount tracking at the lunar rate. I tried merging the images with HDR, but it didn’t work.

A nifty Photoshop action from the Astronomy Tools set by Noel Carboni added the diffraction spikes.

I shot all images with the 130mm Astro-Physics refractor at f/6 and the Canon 60Da camera at ISO 400.

July 18, 2016

Rainbows, Lightning, and Sunsets, Oh My!

Lightning and Rainbow at Sunset

The sky presented a pyrotechnic display of light and colour in the sunset sky.

What a show tonight, July 18, as a thunderstorm lit the sky with bolts of lightning. As the storm retreated, the Sun broke through, ideal lighting for a rainbow. In this case I was able to capture the rainbow pierced by bolts of lightning. See below for tech details.

A little later, the sunlight got stronger and the rainbow grew to span the sky, in a beautiful display of a double rainbow lit by the red light of the setting Sun.

Double Rainbow at Sunset — A double rainbow at sunset on July 18, 2016 after a pyrotechnic thunderstorm. The low Sun is providing the red lighting, with some shafts of sunlight and shadow converging to the anti-solar point. This is a 2-frame panorama with the 16-35mm lens at 16mm, stitched with Adobe Camera Raw.

As the beams of sunlight lit the clouds, it looked like the rainbow was on fire.

Fiery Rainbow at Sunset — A double rainbow at sunset with the last rays of the setting Sun lighting the clouds and making the rainbow look like its on fire. A single image with the 16-35mm lens.

It has been a stormy start to summer in Alberta, but at times the sky has put on a stunning show. That was certainly the case tonight.

Technical on the Lightning and Rainbow shot at top:

This is a stack of 35 consecutive video frames taken with HD (1920 x 1080) resolution at 30 frames per second with the Canon 6D, and extracted as an image sequence with Photoshop, then processed in Adobe Camera Raw, then stacked with Russell Brown’s Stack-A-Matic into a smart object with maximum stack mode, to accumulate the frames taken over about 1 second into one still frame.

So I could have got this with a single 1-second exposure with the lens stopped way down and a ND filter, but my timing would have had to have been very, very lucky!

July 7, 2016July 7, 2016

Alberta Skies – A Music Video

Alberta Skies Title I am pleased to present my latest music video featuring Alberta Skies in motion, set to the music of Ian Tyson.

My 5-minute video features time-lapse imagery shot over the last three years in the plains, badlands, and mountains of Alberta.

Do click through to Vimeo and view in HD for the best quality.

The footage is set to the music of Alberta singer/songwriter Ian Tyson, and his superb rendition of Home on the Range. It is used by kind permission of Ian Tyson and Stony Plain Records. Thanks!

It was hearing Ian’s version of this song on CBC one day in 1992 when his album And Stood There Amazed came out that inspired me to move back to Alberta and the great landscapes of the west that I knew I wanted to capture.

Little did I know at the time how it was going to be possible in the 2000s to do it in time-lapse.

Enjoy!

July 5, 2016

Success! Thank you all!

Star Trails Behind Double Arch

We achieved our funding goal on Kickstarter with 10 days to go.

Hurray! We made it to the top, with funding now secure to complete the production of our video tutorial series.

But the Kickstarter campaign doesn’t end now! You have until July 15 to back us, and get the videos at a big discount off the final retail prices when they are released later this year. So there’s still time to act and save!

Go to our Kickstarter page for the details.

After July 15, you’ll still be able to order the videos through All-Star Telescope, but the cost will be higher.

Many thanks to all who contributed so far and to those who will in future!

— Alan, July 5, 2016 / www.amazingsky.com