moonlight – The Amazing Sky

November 17, 2022November 17, 2022

Marvelous Nights in the Mountains

In mid-October 2022 I enjoyed a rare run of five clear and mild nights in the Rocky Mountains for shooting nightscapes of the stars. Here’s a portfolio … and a behind-the-scenes look at its making.

Getting two perfectly clear nights in a row is unusual in the mountains. Being treated to five is a rare treat. Indeed, had I started my shooting run earlier in the week I could have enjoyed even more of the string of cloudless nights in October, though under a full Moon. But five was wonderful, allowing me to capture some of the scenes that had been on my shot list for the last few years.

Here is a portfolio of the results, from five marvelous nights in Banff and Jasper National Parks, in Alberta, Canada.

For the photographers, I also provide some behind-the-scenes looks at the planning and shooting techniques, and of my processing steps.

Night One — Peyto Lake, Banff National Park

Peyto Lake, named for pioneer settler and trail guide Bill Peyto who had a cabin by the lakeshore, is one of several iconic mountain lakes in Banff. Every tour bus heading along the Icefields Parkway between Banff and Jasper stops here. By day is it packed. By night I had the newly constructed viewpoint all to myself.

The stars of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, over the waters of Peyto Lake, Banff, in deep twilight. This is a stack of 6 x 30-second exposures for the ground and a single untracked 30-second exposure for the sky, all at f/2.8 with the Canon RF 15-35mm lens at 15mm, and Canon R5 at ISO 800.

I shot the classic view north in deep twilight, with the stars of Ursa Major and the Big Dipper low over the lake, as they are in autumn. A show of Northern Lights would have been ideal, but I was happy to settle for just the stars.

This is a blend of two panoramas: the first of the sky taken at or just before moonrise with the camera on a star tracker to keep the stars pinpoint, and the second taken for the ground about 20 minutes later with the tracker off, when the Moon was up high enough to light the peaks. Both pans were with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 15mm and f/2.8, and Canon R5 at ISO 1600, with the sky pan being 7 segments for 1 minute each, and the untracked ground panorama being the same 7 segments for 2 minutes each.

The night was perfect, not just for the clarity of the sky but also the timing. The Moon was just past full, so was rising in late evening, leaving a window of time between the end of twilight and moonrise when the sky would be dark enough to capture the Milky Way. Then shortly after, the Moon would come up, lighting the peaks with golden moonlight — alpenglow, but from the Moon not Sun.

The above is blend of two panoramas, each of seven segments, the first for the sky taken when the sky was dark, using a star tracker to keep the stars pinpoints. The second for the ground I shot a few minutes later at moonrise with no tracking, to keep the ground sharp. I show below how I blended the two elements.

To plan such shots I use the apps The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) and its companion app TPE 3D. The screen shot above at left shows the scene in map view for the night in question, with the Big Dipper indicated north over the lake and the line of dots for the Milky Way showing it to the southwest over Peyto Glacier. Tap or click on the images for full-screen versions.

Switch to TPE 3D and its view at right above simulates the scene you’ll actually see, with the Milky Way over the mountain skyline just as it really appeared. The app even faithfully replicates the lighting on the peaks from the rising Moon. It is an amazing planning tool.

This is a blend of 5 x 20-second exposures stacked for the ground to smooth noise, and a single 20-second exposure for the sky, all with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon R5 at ISO 1600. All were untracked camera-on-tripod shots.

On the drive back from Peyto Lake to Saskatchewan River Crossing I stopped at another iconic spot, the roadside viewpoint for Mt. Cephren at Waterfowl Lakes. By this time, the Moon was well up and fully illuminating the peak and the sky, but still leaving the foreground dark. The sky is blue as it is by day because it is lit by moonlight, which is just sunlight reflecting off a perfectly neutral grey rock, the Moon!

This is from a set of untracked camera-on-tripod shots using short 30-second exposures.

Night Two — Pyramid Lake, Jasper National Park

By the next night I was up in Jasper, a destination I had been trying to revisit for some time. But poor weather prospects and forest fire smoke had kept me away in recent years.

The days and nights I was there coincided with the first weekend of the annual Jasper Dark Sky Festival. I attended one of the events, the very enjoyable Aurora Chaser’s Retreat, with talks and presentations by some well-known chasers of the Northern Lights. Attendees had come from around North America.

This is a blend of: a stack of 4 x 1-minute tracked exposures for the sky at ISO 1600 plus a stack of 7 x 2-minute untracked exposures at ISO 800 for the ground, plus an additional single 1-minute tracked exposure for the reflected stars and the foreground water. All were with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 15mm and f/2.8 and Canon R5.

On my first night in Jasper I headed up to Pyramid Lake, a favorite local spot for stargazing and night sky photography, particularly from the little island connected to the “mainland” by a wooden boardwalk. Lots of people were there quietly enjoying the night. I shared one campfire spot with several other photographers also shooting the Milky Way over the calm lake before moonrise.

This is a blend of: a stack of 4 x 1-minute tracked exposures for the sky at ISO 1600 plus a stack of 6 x 3-minute untracked exposures at ISO 800 for the ground, all with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 20mm and f/2.8 and Canon R5. The tracker was the Star Adventurer Mini.

A little later I moved to the north end of Pyramid Island for the view of the Big Dipper over Pyramid Mountain, now fully lit by the rising waning Moon, and with some aspens still in their autumn colours. A bright meteor added to the scene.

Night Three — Athabasca River Viewpoint, Jasper National Park

For my second night in Jasper, I ventured back down the Icefields Parkway to the “Goats and Glaciers” viewpoint overlooking the Athabasca River and the peaks of the Continental Divide.

This is a blend of three 3-section panoramas: the first taken with a Star Adventurer Mini for 3 x 2-minute tracked exposures for the sky at ISO 800; the second immediately afterward with the tracker off for 3 x 3-minutes at ISO 800 for the ground; and the third taken about an hour later as the Moon rose, lighting the peaks with warm light, for 3 x 2.5-minutes at ISO 1600. All with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at f/2.8 and 15mm and Canon R5,

As I did at Peyto Lake, I shot a panorama (this one in three sections) for the sky before moonrise with a tracker. I then immediately shot another three-section panorama, now untracked, for the ground while it was still lit just by starlight under a dark sky. I then waited an hour for moonrise and shot a third panorama to add in the golden alpenglow on the peaks. So this is a time-blend, bending reality a bit. See my comments below!

Night Four — Edith Lake, Jasper National Park

With a long drive back to Banff ahead of me the next day, for my last night in Jasper I stayed close to town for shots from the popular Edith Lake, just up the road from the posh Jasper Park Lodge. Unlike at Pyramid Lake, I had the lakeshore to myself.

This is a panorama of four segments, each 30 seconds untracked with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 15mm and f/2.8 and Canon R5 at ISO 1000.

This would be a fabulous place to catch the Northern Lights, but none were out this night. Instead, I was content to shoot scenes of the northern stars over the calm lake and Pyramid Mountain.

This is a blend of a single tracked 2-minute exposure for the sky and water with the reflected stars, with a single untracked 4-minute exposure for the rest of the ground, both at f/2.8 with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 17mm and Canon R5 at ISO 800.

This is a blend of a single tracked 2-minute exposure for the sky and water with the reflected stars, with a stack of two untracked 3-minute exposure for the rest of the ground, both at f/2.8 with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at 17mm and Canon R5 at ISO 1600. I shot this October 16, 2022.

The Moon was now coming up late, so the shots above are both in darkness with only starlight providing the illumination. Well, and also some annoying light pollution from town utility sites off the highway. Jasper is a Dark Sky Preserve, but a lot of the town’s street and utility lighting remains unshielded.

Night Five — Lake Louise, Banff National Park

On my last night I was at Lake Louise, as the placement of the Milky Way would be perfect.

This is a blend of two sets of exposures: – a stack of two untracked 2-minute exposures for the ground at ISO 800 – a stack of four tracked 1-minute exposures for the sky at ISO 1600 All with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at f/2.8 and 20mm and Canon R5, and with the camera and tripod not moving between image sets.

There’s no more famous view than this one, with Victoria Glacier at the end of the blue-green glacial lake. Again, by day the site is thronged with people and the parking lot full by early morning.

By night, there were just a handful of other photographers on the lakeshore, and the parking lot was nearly empty. I could park right by the walkway up to the lake.

Again, TPE and TPE 3D told me when the Milky Way would be well-positioned over the lake and glacier, so I could complete the untracked ground shots first, to be ready to shoot the tracked sky segments by the time the Milky Way had turned into place over the glacier.

This is a blend of three vertical panoramas: the first is a set of three untracked 2-minute exposures for the ground at ISO 800 with the camera moved up by 15° from segment to segment; the second shot immediately afterward is made of 7 x 1-minute tracked exposures at ISO 1600 for the sky, also moved 15° vertically from segment to segment; elements of a third 3-section panorama taken about 90 minutes earlier during “blue hour” were blended in at a low level to provide better lighting on the distant peaks. All with the Canon RF15-35mm lens at f/2.8 and 20mm and Canon R5.

This image is also a panorama but a vertical one, made primarily of three untracked segments for the ground and seven tracked segments for the sky, panning up from the horizon to past the zenith overhead, taking in most of the summer and autumn Milky Way from Serpens up to Cassiopeia.

Nightscape Gear

As readers always want to know what gear I used, I shot all images on all nights with the 45-megapixel Canon R5 camera and Canon RF15-35mm lens, with exposures of typically 1 to 3 minutes each at ISOs of 800 to 1600. I had other cameras and lenses with me but never used them.

The R5 works very well for nightscapes, despite its small pixels. See my review of it here on my blog, and of a holy trinity of Canon RF lenses including the RF15-35mm here.

Star Adventurer Mini tracker with Alyn Wallace V-Plate and AcraTech Panorama Head

For a tracker for such images, I used the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Mini, a compact and lightweight unit that is easy to pack and carry to shooting sites. See my review of it here at AstroGearToday.

I use the Mini with a V-Plate designed by nightscape photographer Alyn Wallace and sold by Move-Shoot-Move. It is an essential aid to taking tracked panoramas, as it allows me to turn the camera horizontally manually from one pan segment to the next while the camera is tracking the stars. It’s easy to switch the tracker on (for the sky) and off (for the ground). The Mini tracks quite accurately and reliably. Turn it on and you can be sure it is tracking.

For more tips on shooting panoramas, see my blog post from 2019.

Behind-the-Scenes Processing

For those who are interested, here’s a look at how I processed and assembled the images, using the Peyto Lake panorama as an example. This is not a thorough tutorial, but shows the main steps involved. Tap or click on an image to download a full-size version.

I first develop all the raw files (seven here) in Adobe Camera Raw, applying identical settings to make them look best for what they are going to contribute to the final blend, in this case, for the tracked sky with pinpoint stars and the Milky Way.

Camera Raw (as does Adobe’s Lightroom) has an excellent Merge to Panorama function which usually works very well on such scenes. This shows the stitched sky panorama, created with one click.

I develop and stitch the untracked ground segments to look their best for revealing details in the landscape, overexposing the sky in the process. Stars are also trailed, from the long exposures needed for the dark ground. No matter – these will be masked out.

This shows the stack of images now in Adobe Photoshop, but here revealing just the layer for the sky panorama and its associated adjustment layers to further tweak color and contrast. I often add noise reduction as a non-destructive “smart filter” applied to the “smart object” image layer. See my review of noise reduction programs here.

This shows just the ground panorama layer, again with some adjustment and retouching layers dedicated to this portion of the image.

The sky has to be masked out of the ground panorama, to reveal the sky below. The Select Sky command in Photoshop usually works well, or I just use the Quick Selection tool and then Select and Mask to refine the edge. That method can be more accurate.

Aligning the two panoramas requires manually nudging the untracked ground, up in this case, to hide the blurred and dark horizon from the tracked sky panorama. Yes, we move the earth! The sky usually also requires some re-touching to clone out blurred horizon bits sticking up. Dealing with trees can be a bit messy!

The result is the scene above with both panorama layers and the masks turned on. While this now looks almost complete, we’re not done yet.

Local adjustments like Dodge and Burn (using a neutral grey layer with a Soft Light blend mode) and some luminosity masks tweak the brightness of portions of the scene for subtle improvements, to emphasize some areas while darkening others. It’s what film photographers did in the darkroom by waving physical dodging and burning tools under the enlarger.

I add finishing touches with some effect plug-ins: Radiant Photo added some pop to the ground, while Luminar Neo added a soft “Orton glow” effect to the sky and slightly to the ground.

All the adjustments, filters, and effects are non-destructive so they can be re-adjusted later, when upon further inspection with fresh eyes I realize something needs work.

Was It Photoshopped?

I hope my look behind the curtains was of interest. While these types of nightscapes taken with a tracker, and especially multi-segment panoramas, do produce dramatic images, they do require a lot of processing at the computer.

Was it “photoshopped?” Yes. Was it faked? No. The sky really was there over the scene you see in the image. However, the long exposures of the camera do reveal more details than the eye alone can see at night — that is the essence of astrophotography.

My one concession to warping reality is in the time-blending — the merging of panoramas taken 30 minutes to an hour apart. I’ll admit that does push my limits for preferring to record real scenes, and not fabricate them (i.e. “photoshop” them in common parlance).

But at this shoot on these marvelous nights, making use of the perfectly timed moonrises was hard to resist!

— Alan, November 17, 2022 / AmazingSky.com

April 27, 2019

Shooting Moonstrikes at Dinosaur Park

Moonlight at Dino Park Title

It was a magical night as the rising Moon lit the Badlands with a golden glow.

When doing nightscape photography it’s often best not to fight the Moon, but to embrace it and use it as your light source.

I did this on a fine night, Easter Sunday, at one of my favourite nightscape spots, Dinosaur Provincial Park.

I set up two cameras to frame different views of the hoodoos as they lit up with the light of the rising waning Moon.

The night started out as a dark moonless evening as twilight ended. Then about 90 minutes after the arrival of darkness, the sky began to brighten again as the Moon rose to illuminate the eroded formations of the Park.

Moonrise Light at Dinosaur Park - West — The formations of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, lit by the rising gibbous Moon, off camera at left, on April 21/22, 2019. This is looking west, with the stars of the winter sky setting. Procyon is at right. Aphard in Hydra is above the hill. This is a stack of 8 exposures, mean combined to smooth noise, for the ground, and a single exposure for the sky, all with the 24mm Sigma Art lens at f/5.6 and Nikon D750 at ISO 6400, each for 25 seconds. The images were from the end of a sequence shot for a time-lapse using the TimeLapse+ View intervaolometer.

This was a fine example of “bronze hour” illumination, as some have aptly called it.

Photographers know about the “golden hour,” the time just before sunset or just after sunrise when the low Sun lights the landscape with a golden glow.

The Moon does the same thing, with a similar tone, though greatly reduced in intensity.

The low Moon, especially just after Full, casts a yellow or golden tint over the scene. This is caused by our atmosphere absorbing the “cold” blue wavelengths of moonlight, and letting through the “warm” red and yellow tones.

Making use of the rising (or setting) Moon to light a scene is one way to capture a nightscape lit naturally, and not with artificial lights, which are increasingly being frowned upon, if not banned at popular nightscape destinations.

StarryNightImage — A screen shot from the desktop app Starry Night (by Simulation Curriculum) showing the waning gibbous Moon rising in the SE on April 21. Such “planetarium” apps are useful for simulating the sky of a planned shoot.

“Bronze hour” lighting is great in still-image nightscapes. But in time-lapses the effect is more striking — indeed, in time-lapse lingo it is called a “moonstrike” scene.

The dark landscape suddenly lights up as if it were dawn, yet stars remain in the sky.

A screen shot of a planning app that is a favourite of mine, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, set up to show the scene for moonrise on April 21 from the Park.

The best nights for such a moonstrike are ones with a waning gibbous or last quarter Moon. At these phases the Moon rises after sunset, to re-light a scene after evening twilight has faded.

On April 21 I made use of such a circumstance to shoot moonstrike stills and movies, not only for their own sake, but for use as illustrations in the next edition of my Nightscapes and Time-lapse eBook (at top here).

TimeLapse+View-Day Interval

One camera, the Nikon D750, I coupled with a device called a bramping intervalometer, in this case the TimeLapse+ View, shown above. It works great to automatically shift the shutter and ISO speeds as the sky darkens then brightens again.

Yes, in bright situations the camera’s own Auto Exposure and Auto ISO modes might accomplish this.

But … once the sky gets dark the Auto circuits fail and you’re left with hugely underexposed images.

The TimeLapse+ View, with its more sensitive built-in light meter, can track right through into full darkness, making it possible to shoot so-called “holy grail” time-lapses that go from daylight to darkness, from sunset to the Milky Way, all shot unattended.

Moonrise Light at Dinosaur Park - North — The eroding formations of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, lit by the rising gibbous Moon, off camera at right, on April 21/22, 2019. This is looking north, with Polaris at upper centre, Capella setting at left, Vega rising at right, and the W of Cassiopeia at lower centre. This is a stack of 8 exposures, mean combined to smooth noise, for the ground, and one exposure from that set for the sky. All with the 15mm Laowa lens at f/2.8 and Sony a7III at ISO 3200, each for 30 seconds.

For the other camera, the Sony a7III (with the Laowa 15mm lens I just reviewed) I set the camera manually, then shifted the ISO and shutter speed a couple of times to accommodate the darkening, then brightening of the scene.

Processing the resulting RAW files in the highly-recommended program LRTimelapse smoothed out all the jumps in brightness to make a seamless transition.

I also used the new intervalometer function that Sony has just added to the a7III with its latest firmware update. Hurray! I complained about the lack of an intervalometer in my original review of the Sony a7III. But that’s been fixed.

Moonrise Star Trails at Dinosaur Park — This is looking north, with the stars of the northern sky pivoting around Polaris. This is a stack of 8 exposures, mean combined to smooth noise, for the ground, and 250 exposures for the sky, blended with Lighten mode to create the stails. However, I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions in Photoshop to do the stacking, creating the tapering effect in the process. All exposures with the 15mm Laowa lens at f/2.8 and Sony a7III at ISO 3200, each for 30 seconds.

I shot 425 frames with the Sony, which I not only turned into a movie but, as one can with time-lapse frames, I also stacked into a star trail still image, in this case looking north to the circumpolar stars.

To do the stacking I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions for Photoshop, developed and sold by StarCircleAcademy.

I prefer this action set over dedicated programs such as StarStaX, because it works directly with the developed Raw files. There’s no need to create a set of JPGs to stack, compromising image quality, and departing from the non-destructive workflow I prefer to maintain.

While the still images are very nice, the intended final result was this movie above, a short time-lapse vignette using clips from both cameras. Do watch in HD.

I rendered out the frames from the Sony both as a “normal” time-lapse, and as one with accumulating star trails, again using the Advanced Stacker Plus actions to create the intermediate frames for assembling into the movie.

All these techniques, gear, and apps are explained in tutorials in my eBook, above. However, it’s always great to get a night perfect for putting the methods to work on a real scene.

March 26, 2019April 1, 2019

Banff by Moonlight, a 25-Year Challenge

Selfie at Lake Louise in Moonlight

For two magical nights I was able to capture the Rockies by moonlight, with the brilliant stars of winter setting behind the mountains.

I’ve been waiting for nights like these for many years! I consider this my “25-Year Challenge!”

Back during my early years of shooting nightscapes I was able to capture the scene of Orion setting over Lake Louise and the peaks of the Continental Divide, with the landscape lit by the Moon.

Such a scene is possible only in late winter, before Orion sets out of sight and, in March, with a waxing gibbous Moon to the east to light the scene but not appear in the scene. There are only a few nights each year the photograph is possible. Most are clouded out!

Orion Over Lake Louise, 1995 — Orion over Lake Louise, Banff National Park, Alberta March 1995 at Full Moon 28mm lens at f/2.8 Ektachrome 400 slide film

Above is the scene in March 1995, in one of my favourite captures on film. What a night that was!

But it has taken 24 years for my schedule, the weather, and the Moon phase to all align to allow me to repeat the shoot in the digital age. Thus the Challenge.

Here’s the result.

Orion Setting over Victoria Glacier — Orion setting over the iconic Victoria Glacier at Lake Louise, with the scene lit by the light of the waxing Moon, on March 19, 2019. This is a panorama of 3 segments stitched with Adobe Camera Raw, each segment 8 seconds at f/3.5 with the Sigma 24mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800.

Unlike with film, digital images make it so much easier to stitch multiple photos into a panorama.

In the film days I often shot long single exposures to produce star trails, though the correct exposure was an educated guess factoring in variables like film reciprocity failure and strength of the moonlight.

Below is an example from that same shoot in March 1995. Again, one of my favourite film images.

This year, time didn’t allow me to shoot enough images for a star trail. In the digital age, we generally shoot lots of short exposures to stack them for a trail.

Instead, I shot this single image of Orion setting over Mt. Temple.

Orion and Canis Major over Mt. Temple — The winter stars of Orion (centre), Canis Major (left) and Taurus (upper right) over Mt. Temple in Banff National Park. This is from the Morant’s Curve viewpoint on the Bow Valley Parkway, on March 19, 2019. Illumination is from moonlight from the waxing gibbous Moon off frame to the left. This is a single 8-second exposure at f/3.2 with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800.

Plus I shot the panorama below, both taken at Morant’s Curve, a viewpoint named for the famed CPR photographer Nicholas Morant who often shot from here with large format film cameras. Kevin Keefe of Trains magazine wrote a nice blog about Morant.

Night Train in the Moonlight at Morant's Curve — A panorama of Morant’s Curve, on the Bow River in Banff National Park, with an eastbound train on the CPR tracks under the stars of the winter sky. Illumination is from the 13-day gibbous Moon off frame at left. Each segment is 8 seconds at f/3.2 and ISO 800 with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 in portrait orientation.

I was shooting multi-segment panoramas when a whistle in the distance to the west alerted me to the oncoming train. I started the panorama segment shooting at the left, and just by good luck the train was in front of me at centre when I hit the central segment. I continued to the right to catch the blurred rest of the train snaking around Morant’s Curve. I was very pleased with the result.

The night before I was at another favourite spot, Two Jack Lake near Banff, to again shoot panoramas of the moonlit scene below the bright stars of the winter sky.

Parks Canada Red Chairs under the Winter Sky at Two Jack Lake — These are the iconic red chairs of Parks Canada, here at frozen Two Jack Lake, Banff National Park, and under the moonlit winter sky. This was March 18, 2019, with the scene illuminated by the gibbous Moon just at the frame edge here. This is a panorama of 11-segments, each 10 seconds at f/4 with the Sigma 24mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800.

A run up to the end of the Vermilion Lakes road at the end of that night allowed me to capture Orion and Siris reflected in the open water of the upper lake.

Orion Setting in the Moonlight at Vermilion Lakes — The winter stars setting at Vermilion Lakes in Banff National Park, on March 18, 2019. This is a panorama cropped from a set of 11 images, all with the 24mm Sigma Art lens at f/3.2 for 10 seconds each and the Nikon D750 at ISO 800, in portrait orientation.

Unlike in the film days, today we also have some wonderful digital planning tools to help us pick the right sites and times to capture the scene as we envision it.

This is a screen shot of the PhotoPills app in its “augmented reality” mode, taken by day during a scouting session at Two Jack, but showing where the Milky Way will be later that night in relation to the real “live” scene shot with the phone’s camera.

The app I like for planning before the trip is The Photographer’s Ephemeris. This is a shot of the plan for the Lake Louise shoot. The yellow lines are the sunrise and sunset points. The thin blue line at lower right is the angle toward the gibbous Moon at about 10 p.m. on March 19.

Even better than TPE is its companion program TPE 3D, which allows you to preview the scene with the mountain peaks, sky, and illumination all accurately simulated for your chosen location. I am impressed!

Compare the simulation above to the real thing below, in a wide 180° panorama.

Lake Louise Panorama by Winter Moonlight — A panorama of Lake Louise in winter, in Banff National Park, Alberta, taken under the light of the waxing gibbous Moon, off frame here to the left. This was March 19, 2019. This is a crop from the original 16-segment panorama, each segment with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750, oriented “portrait.” Each segment was 8 seconds at f/3.2 and ISO 800.

These sort of moonlit nightscapes are what I started with 25 years ago, as they were what film could do well.

These days, everyone chases after dark sky scenes with the Milky Way, and they do look wonderful, beyond anything film could do. I shoot many myself. And I include an entire chapter in my ebook above about shooting the Milky Way.

But … there’s still a beauty in a contrasty moonlit scene with a deep blue sky from moonlight, especially with the winter sky and its population of bright stars and constellations.

Parks Canada Red Chairs under the Winter Stars at Mount Rundle — These are the iconic red chairs of Parks Canada, here on the Tunnel Mountain Drive viewpoint overlooking the Bow River and Mount Rundle, in Banff National Park, and under the moonlit winter sky. This is a panorama cropped from the original 12-segments, each 15 seconds at f/4 with the Sigma 24mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800.

I’m glad the weather and Moon finally cooperated at the right time to allow me to capture these magical moonlit panoramas.

April 28, 2018

Moonlight in the Badlands

Stars over Sedimentary Layers

Clear nights and a waxing Moon made for great opportunities to shoot the Badlands under moonlight.

This has not been a great spring. Only now is the last of the snow melting here in Alberta.

But some mild and clear nights this week with the waxing gibbous Moon allowed me to head to the Red Deer River valley near where I live in Alberta for some moonlit nightscapes.

Big Dipper over the Badlands

Here’s the Big Dipper high overhead as it is in spring pointing down to Polaris.

I shot this and some other images in this gallery with the new Sony a7III mirrorless camera. A full test of its astrophoto abilities is in the works.

Jupiter Rising over Red Deer River Badlands

This is Jupiter rising, with the Moon lighting the sky, and illuminating the landscape. Moonlight is the same colour as sunlight, just much fainter. So while this might look like a daytime scene, it isn’t.

Venus in Twilight at the Hoodoos

This is Venus setting in the evening twilight at the Hoodoos on Highway 10 near Drumheller. The winter stars are setting into the west, to disappear for a few months.

Venus, Pleiades and Hyades in Twilight

Here’s Venus in closeup, passing between the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in Taurus, low in the twilight over the scenic Horsethief Canyon area of the Red Deer River.

While Venus is climbing higher into our evening sky this spring, the Pleiades, Hyades and all the winter stars are fast disappearing from view.

We say goodbye to winter, and not a moment too soon!

November 29, 2017

Winter Stars over the Badlands

The clouds cleared to present a magical night under the Moon in the Badlands of southern Alberta.

At last, a break in the incessant clouds of November, to provide me with a fine night of photography at one of my favourite places, Dinosaur Provincial Park, declared a U.N. World Heritage Site for its deposits of late Cretaceous fossils.

I go there to shoot the night sky over the iconic hoodoos and bentonite clay hills.

November is a great time to capture the equally iconic constellation of Orion rising in the east in the early evening. The scene is even better if there’s a Moon to light the landscape.

November 27 presented the ideal combination of circumstances: clear skies (at least later at night), and a first quarter Moon to provide enough light without washing out the sky too much and positioned to the south and west away from the target of interest – Orion and the winter sky rising in the east.

Below is a slide show of some of the still images I shot, all with the Canon 6D MkII camera and fine Rokinon 14mm f/2.5 lens, used wide open. Most are 15-second exposures, untracked.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I kept another camera, the Nikon D750 and Sigma 24mm Art lens, busy all night shooting 1200 frames for a time-lapse of Orion rising, with clouds drifting through, then clearing.

Below is the resulting video, presented in two versions: first with the original but processed frames assembled into a movie, followed by a version where the movie frames show accumulating star trails to provide a better sense of sky motion.

To create the frames for this version I used the Photoshop actions Advanced Stacker Plus, from StarCircleAcademy. They can stack images then export a new set of frames each with the tapering trails, which you then assemble into a movie. I also used it to produce the lead image at top.

The techniques and steps are all outlined in my eBook, highlighted at top right.

The HD movie is just embedded here, and is not published on Vimeo or YouTube. Expand to fill your screen.

To help plan the shoot I used the astronomy software Starry Night, and the photo planning software The Photographer’s Ephemeris, or TPE. With it, you can place yourself at the exact spot to see how the Sun, Moon and stars will appear in sightlines to the horizon.

Here’s the example screen shot. The spheres across the sky represent the Milky Way.

Look east to see Orion now in the evening sky. Later this winter, Orion will be due south at nightfall.

Clear skies!

July 12, 2017November 14, 2023

Arc of the Low Summer Moon

The summer Full Moon arcs low across the southern sky, mimicking the path of the winter Sun.

This is a project I had in mind for the last month, and hoped to capture at the July Full Moon. A clear, dry, and cooperative night provide the chance.

The still images are composites of 40 images of the Moon traveling across the sky from dusk to dawn, taken at 10-minute intervals. They are layered onto a blend of background images of the 10 p.m. dusk sky (left), 2 a.m. middle-of-the-night sky (middle), and 5 a.m dawn sky (right).

As a bonus, the 10 p.m. sky shows some dark crepuscular rays in the twilight, while at 2 a.m. the Moon was in light cloud and surrounded by iridescent colours. By 5 a.m. denser clouds were moving in to obscure the Moon.

Arc of the Summer Moon

I shot the still image composite (above) and time-lapse movie (below) to illustrate the low arc of a summer Full Moon. In summer (June or July) the Full Moon sits at a similar place near the ecliptic as does the Sun in winter near the December solstice.

From the northern hemisphere the low position of the winter Sun gives us the short, cold days of winter. In summer, the similar low position of the Full Moon simply gives us a low Full Moon! But it is one that can be impressive and photogenic.

The time-lapse movie uses all 400 frames of the moving Moon superimposed onto the same background sky images, but now dissolving from one to the other.

The movie is 4K in resolution, though can be viewed at a smaller resolution to speed up playback if needed.

For the technically minded:

The Moon disks in the time-lapse and still composite come from a series of short 1/15-second exposures, short enough to record just the disks of the bright Moon set against a dark, underexposed sky.

I took these shots every minute, for 400 in total. They are blended into the bright background sky images using a Lighten blend mode, both in Photoshop for the still image, and in Final Cut for the movie.

The background sky images are longer exposures to record the sky colours, and stars (in the case of the 2 a.m. image). They are blended with gradient masks for the still image, but dissolved from one to the other in the time-lapse movie.

I shot the frames with a 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens and Canon 6D, with the camera not moved during the 7-hour shoot.

September 20, 2016September 20, 2016

Harvest Aurora

With the harvest in full swing, the aurora and Moon lit the fields on a clear September evening.

This night, September 19, showed prospects for a good display of Northern Lights, and sure enough as it got dark a bright, well-defined arc of Lights danced to the north.

I headed off to some photogenic spots near home, on the prairies of southern Alberta. By the time I got in place, the aurora had already faded.

However, the arc still photographed well and provided a great backdrop to these rural scenes. The rising Moon, then 3 days past full, lit the foreground. In the lead image, lights from combines and trucks working the field behind the bins are at left.

Aurora and Harvest Moon at the Old Barn — A diffuse arc of aurora and the rising waning gibbous Moon light the sky over the old barn near home at harvest time, September 19, 2016. The glows from Strathmore and Calgary light the clouds to the west at far left. The Big Dipper shines over the barn, with Capella and the stars of Perseus at right. The Pleiades are rising to the left of the Moon. This is a panorama of 5 segments, with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750. Stitched with ACR.

The image above was from later in the night, just down the road at a favourite and photogenic grand old barn.

Big Dipper and Aurora over Old Barn #1 — The Big Dipper and a diffuse aurora over the old barn near home, in southern Alberta, on September 16, 2016. The waning gibbous Moon off camera at right provides the illumination. This is a stack of 4 exposures, averaged, for the ground to smooth noise and one exposure for the sky to keep the stars untrailed. All 13 seconds at f/2.8 with the Sigma 20mm lens, and ISO 1600 with the Nikon D750. Diffraction spikes on stars added with Noel Carboni’s Astronomy Tools actions.

Note the Big Dipper above the barn. A waning and rising Moon like this is great for providing warm illumination.

The time around equinox is usually good for auroras, as the interplanetary and terrestrial magnetic fields line up better to let in the electrons from the Sun. So perhaps we’ll see more Lights, with the Moon now gradually departing the evening sky.

August 13, 2016August 13, 2016

The Perseids Perform

Radiant of the Perseid Meteor Shower (2016)

It was a great night for shooting meteors as the annual Perseids put on a show.

For the Perseid meteor shower I went to one of the darkest sites in Canada, Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan, a dark sky preserve and home to several rare species requiring dark nights to flourish – similar to astronomers!

This year a boost in activity was predicted and the predictions seemed to hold true. The lead image records 33 meteors in a series of stacked 30-second exposures taken over an hour.

It shows only one area of sky, looking east toward the radiant point in the constellation Perseus – thus the name of the shower.

Extrapolating the count to the whole sky, I think it’s safe to say there would have been 100 or more meteors an hour zipping about, not bad for my latitude of 49° North.

Lone Perseid in the Moonlight — A lone Perseid meteor streaking down below the radiant point in Perseus, with the sky and landscape lit by the waxing gibbous Moon, August 11, 2016. Perseus is rising in the northeast, Andromeda is at right, with the Andromeda Galaxy right of centre. Cassiopeia is at top. Taken from the 70 Mile Butte trailhead in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan.

The early part of the evening was lit by moonlight, which lent itself to some nice nightscapes scenes but fewer meteors.

Perseid Meteor Shower Looking North (2016) — The 2016 Perseid meteor shower, in a view looking north to the Big Dipper and with the radiant point in Perseus at upper right, the point where the meteors appear to be streaking from. This is a stack of 10 frames, shot over one hour from 1:38 a.m. to 2:37 a.m. CST. The camera was on the Star Adventurer tracker so all the sky frames aligned. The ground is from a stack of four frames, mean combined to smooth noise, and taken with the tracker motor off to minimize ground blurring, and taken at the start of the sequence. All exposures 40 seconds at f/3.2 with the 16-35mm lens and Canon 6D at ISO 6400.

But once the Moon set and the sky darkened the show really began. Competing with the meteors was some dim aurora, but also the brightest display of airglow I have even seen.

It was bright enough to be visible to the eye as grey bands, unusual. Airglow is normally sub-visual.

But the camera revealed the airglow bands as green, red, and yellow, from fluorescing oxygen and sodium atoms. The bands slowly rippled across the sky from south to north.

Airglow is something you can see only from dark sites. It is one of the wonders of the night sky, that can make a dark sky not dark!

TECHNICAL:

The lead image is stack of 31 frames containing meteors (two frames had 2 meteors), shot from 1:13 am to 2:08 a.m. CST, so over 55 minutes. The camera was not tracking the sky but was on a fixed tripod. I choose one frame with the best visibility of the airglow as the base layer. For every other meteor layer, I used Free Transform to rotate each frame around a point far off frame at upper left, close to where the celestial pole would be and then nudged each frame to bring the stars into close alignment with the base layer, especially near the meteor being layered in.

This placed each meteor in its correct position in the sky in relation to the stars, essential for showing the effect of the radiant point accurately.

Each layer above the base sky layer is masked to show just the meteor and is blended with Lighten mode. If I had not manually aligned the sky for each frame, the meteors would have ended up positioned where they appeared in relation to the ground but the radiant point would have been smeared — the meteors would have been in the wrong place.

Unfortunately, it’s what I see in a lot of composited meteor shower shots.

It would have been much easier if I had had this camera on a tracker so all frames would have been aligned coming out of the camera. But the other camera was on the tracker! It took the other composite image, the one looking north.

The ground is a mean combined stack of 4 frames to smooth noise in the ground. Each frame is 30 seconds at f/2 with the wonderful Sigma 20mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 5000. The waxing Moon had set by the time this sequence started, leaving the sky dark and the airglow much more visible.

June 23, 2016

Halo Around the Moon

Halo Around the Solstice Moon

On the night before the solstice Full Moon, the sky added a coloured halo around the Moon.

On June 19 I was at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta to teach a workshop on night photography, as one of the programs of the Park’s annual Wildflower Festival. The night proved hazy, but that added the attraction of an ice crystal halo around the Moon.

The lead image above is from Driftwood Beach, looking south across Middle Waterton Lake. Note Mars shining above the mountains at right.

Earlier in the night, at Red Rock Canyon, we watched the Moon rise in the twilight, then climb up the side of Mt. Blakiston. Here (below) it shines above the summit, surrounded by its hazy halo.

Lunar Halo over Mt. Blakiston — Lunar halo in a hazy sky at Red Rock Canyon, Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, with the Full Moon over Mt. Blakiston. This is a high-dynamic range stack of 6 exposures, to avoid the area around the Moon from blowing out too much while recorded detail in the dark foreground. All with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750.

The workshop participants made the best of the night, shooting the moonlit scene down the canyon, toward the north and Cassiopeia.

Photographer Shooting at Red Rock Canyon — Nightscape photographer at a workshop I was presenting, shooting Red Rock Canyon in the moonlight at Waterton Lakes National Park, June 19, 2016. Cassiopeia is in the sky to the north. This is a single exposure for 13 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 800 with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750.

And as here, shooting from the canyon footbridge, toward the very photogenic Anderson Peak, with Jupiter just above the peak.

Night Photographers at Red Rock Canyon — A workshop group of photographers at Red Rock Canyon at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, during the 2016 Wildflower Festival, June 19, 2016. Taken by the light of the Full Moon at solstice. Jupiter is the bright object behind Anderson Peak.

In keeping with the wildflower theme, I shot wild roses, Alberta’s provincial flower, in the moonlight, with Anderson Peak and stars in the distance.

Wild Roses in the Mountain Moonlight — Alberta wild roses in the moonlight with Anderson Peak in the background, at Red Rock Canyon, Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. Taken on Full Moon night June 19, 2016, at a workshop on nightscape imaging I was teaching as part of the Waterton Wildflower Festival. This is a single exposure at f/8 for 20 seconds at ISO 3200 with the 20mm lens and Nikon D750.

While we might like dark skies when going to places like Waterton, there are many magical options for photography when the Moon is shining.

May 17, 2016

Mars in the Moonlight

Mars in the Badlands

Mars is approaching! It now shines brightly in the midnight sky as a red star in Scorpius.

You can’t miss Mars now. It is shining brighter than it has since 2005, and is about to come as close to Earth as it has in 11 years as well.

Mars is now approaching opposition, when the Earth comes closest to Mars, and the Sun, Earth and Mars lie along the same line. Opposition date is May 22. That’s when Mars shines at its brightest, at magnitude -2.1, about as bright as Jupiter. Only Venus can be a brighter planet and it’s not in our sky right now.

A week later, on May 30, Mars comes closest to Earth, at a distance of 75 million kilometres. That’s when the disk of Mars looks largest in a telescope. And you will need a telescope at high power (150x to 250x) to make out the dark markings, north polar cap, and bright white clouds on Mars.

Mars in the Moonlight (May 13, 2016) — Mars above Antares, with Saturn to the left, low in the south on May 13, 2016, in the moonlight of a waxing quarter Moon, from home in Alberta. This was one week before opposition and two weeks before closest approach, so Mars is particularly bright and red. However, from my latitude of 50° N Mars appears low in the south. This is a single 15-second exposure, untracked, at f/2.5 with the 35mm lens and Canon 6D at ISO 2000.

In these views, I show Mars shining as a bright reddish star low in my western Canadian sky. I shot the lead image from Dinosaur Provincial Park on May 16. The image just above was from my backyard the night before.

This week, Mars is passing between Beta and Delta Scorpii, two bright stars in the head of Scorpius, as the red planet retrogrades westward against the background stars.

Saturn shines to the east (left) of Mars now, with both planets shining above the red giant star Antares in Scorpius. In these photos they form a neat triangle.

Even without a telescope to magnify the view, it’ll be rewarding to watch Mars with the unaided eye or binoculars as it treks west out of Scorpius into Libra this spring and summer. It stops retrograding on June 30, then starts looping back into Scorpius, for a rendezvous with Antares and Saturn in late August.

This little compilation of time-lapse movies shows Mars, Saturn, and the rest of the sky, rising into the southeast and across the south on two nights this past week.

Be sure to explore Mars this month and next, whether by eye or by telescope. It’s the best we’ve seen it in a decade.

It’s next close approach in 2018 will be even better, though Mars will appear even lower in our northern sky.

November 24, 2015

Orion Star Trails in the Moonlight

Orion ascends into the sky on a clear autumn night, with its stars drawing trails behind it as it rises.

Only on November nights is it possible to capture Orion rising in the evening sky. Here, I used the light of the waxing gibbous Moon to illuminate the landscape … and the sky, creating the deep blue tint.

The lead image above is an example of a star trail, a long exposure that uses Earth’s rotation to turn the stars into streaks across the sky. In the old days of film you would create such an exposure by opening the shutter for an hour or more and hoping for the best.

Today, with digital cameras, the usual method is to shoot lots of short exposures, perhaps no more than 20 to 40 seconds each in rapid succession. You then stack them later in Photoshop or other specialized software to create the digital equivalent of a single long exposure.

The image above is a stack of 350 images taken over 2.5 hours.

With a folder of such images, you can either stack them to create a single image, such as above, or string them together in time to create a time-lapse of the stars moving across the sky. The short video below shows the result. Enlarge the screen and click HD for the best quality.

For the still image and time-lapse, I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions from StarCircleAcademy to do the stacking in Photoshop and create the tapering star trail effect. A separate exposure after the main trail set added the point-like stars at the end of the trails.

My tutorial on Vimeo provides all the details on how to shoot, then stack, such a star trail image…

… While this video illustrates how to capture and process nightscapes shot under the light of the Moon.

Enjoy the videos! And happy trails!

November 21, 2015February 23, 2016

Astrophotography Video Tutorials – Free!

Learn the basics of shooting nightscape and time-lapse images with my three new video tutorials.

In these comprehensive and free tutorials I take you from “field to final,” to illustrate tips and techniques for shooting the sky at night.

At sites in southern Alberta I first explain how to shoot the images. Then back at the computer I step you through how to process non-destructively, using images I shot that night in the field.

Tutorial #1 – The Northern Lights

This 24-minute tutorial takes you from a shoot at a lakeside site in southern Alberta on a night with a fine aurora display, through to the steps to processing a still image and assembling a time-lapse movie.

Tutorial #2 – Moonlit Nightscapes

This 28-minute tutorial takes you from a shoot at Waterton Lakes National Park on a bright moonlit night, to the steps for processing nightscapes using Camera Raw and Photoshop, with smart filters, adjustment layers and masks.

Tutorial #3 – Star Trails

This 35-minute tutorial takes you from a shoot at summer solstice at Dinosaur Provincial Park, then through the steps for stacking star trail stills and assembling star trail time-lapse movies, using specialized programs such as StarStaX and the Advanced Stacker Plus actions for Photoshop.

As always, enlarge to full screen for the HD versions. These are also viewable at my Vimeo channel.

Or they can be viewed on my YouTube channel.

Thanks for watching!

And for much more information about shooting and processing nightscapes and time-lapse movies, check out my 400-page multimedia eBook, linked below.

November 1, 2015November 1, 2015

Dawn Dance of Planets Concludes

$The planet trio of Venus (brightest), Jupiter (above Venus) and Mars (dim and red to the left of Venus), all in Leo in the morning sky on November 1, 2015, with the waning gibbous Moon illuminating the landscape and sky. Even in the moonlight, the Zodiacal Light seems to be faintly visible along the ecliptic defined by the line of planets. This is a stack of 6 x 30-second exposures at f/5.6 and ISO 2500 for more depth of the field for the ground, plus a 13-second exposure at f/2.5 and ISO 800 to minimize star trailing. The ground exposures were mean combined in a stack to smooth noise. Diffraction spikes added with Astronomy Tools Actions for Photoshop.$

The gathering of planets at dawn is coming to an end as Venus meets Mars.

This was the view this morning from home in southern Alberta of the trio of planets in the moonlit morning sky.

Venus is the brightest, while dim red Mars shines just to the left of Venus. Jupiter is above the Venus & Mars pairing, with all the planets shining in Leo.

$The planet trio of Venus (brightest), Jupiter (above Venus) and Mars (dim and red to the left of Venus), all in Leo in the morning sky on November 1, 2015, with the waning gibbous Moon illuminating the landscape and sky. The stars of Leo, including Regulus, shine above the planets. This is a stack of 4 x 30-second exposures at f/5.6 and ISO 2000 for more depth of the field for the ground, plus a 10-second exposure at f/2.8 and ISO 2000 to minimize star trailing. The ground exposures were mean combined in a stack to smooth noise. Diffraction spikes added with Astronomy Tools Actions for Photoshop.$

Mars and Venus will appear closest to each other on November 2 and 3. Then the group breaks apart as Venus descends but Mars and Jupiter climb higher.

But as they do so they are joined by the waning Moon, by then a thin crescent, on November 6, when the Moon shines near Jupiter, and November 7, when it joins Venus for a stunning dawn sky scene.

After that the morning planet dance comes to an end. But in two months, in early January, Venus will meet up with Saturn for a very close conjunction in the winter dawn sky on January 9.

October 4, 2015

The Lunar Eclipse, to True Scale

My multiple-exposure composite shows the complete September 27, 2015 total lunar eclipse to true scale, with the Moon accurately depicted in size and position in the sky.

From my location at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta, Canada, the Moon rose in the east at lower left already in partial eclipse.

As it rose it moved into Earth’s shadow and became more red, while the sky darkened from twilight to night, bringing out the stars.

Then, as the Moon continued to rise higher it emerged from Earth’s shadow, at upper right, and returned to a brilliant Full Moon again, here overexposed and now illuminating the landscape with moonlight.

TECHNICAL

The disks of the Moon become overexposed in my composite as the sky darkened because I was setting exposures to show the sky and landscape well, not just the Moon itself. That’s because I shot these frames – and many more! – primarily for use as a time-lapse movie where I wanted the entire scene well exposed in each frame.

Indeed, for this still-image composite of the eclipse from beginning to end, I used just 40 frames taken at 5-minute intervals, selected from 530 I shot, taken at 15- to 30-second intervals for the full time-lapse sequence.

All were taken with a fixed camera, a Canon 6D, with a 35mm lens, to nicely frame the entire path of the Moon, from moonrise at lower left, until it exited the frame at top right, as the partial eclipse was ending.

In the interest of full disclosure, the ground comes from a blend of three frames taken at the beginning, middle, and end of the sequence, and so is partly lit by twilight and moonlight, to reveal the ground detail better than in the single starlit frame from mid-eclipse. Lights at lower left are from the Park’s campground.

The background sky comes from a blend of two exposures: one from the middle of the eclipse when the sky was darkest, and one from the end of the eclipse when the sky was now lit deep blue. The stars come from the mid-eclipse frame, a 30-second exposure.

MY RANT FOR REALITY

So, yes, this is certainly a composite assembled in Photoshop – a contrast to the old days of film where one might attempt such an image just by exposing the same piece of film multiple times, usually with little success.

However … the difference between this image and most you’ve seen on the web of this and other eclipses, is that the size of the Moon and its path across the sky are accurate, because all the images for this composite were taken with the same lens using a camera that did not move during the 3-hour eclipse.

This is how big the Moon actually appeared in the sky in relation to the ground and how it moved across the sky during the eclipse, in what is essentially a straight line, not a giant curving arc as in many viral eclipse images.

And, sorry if the size of the Moon seems disappointingly small, but it is small! This is what a lunar eclipse really looks like to correct scale.

By comparison, many lunar eclipse composites you’ve seen are made of giant moons shot with a telephoto lens that the photographer then pasted into a wide-angle sky scene, often badly, and pasted in locations on the frame that usually bear no resemblance to where the Moon actually was in the sky, but are just placed where the photographer thought would look the nicest.

You would never, ever do that for any other form of landscape photography, at least not without having your reputation tarnished. But with the Moon it seems anything is permitted, even amongst professional landscape photographers.

No, you cannot just place a Moon anywhere you like in your image, eclipse or no eclipse, then pass it off as a real image. Fantasy art perhaps. Fine. But not a photograph of nature.

Sorry for the rant, but I prefer accuracy over fantasy in such lunar eclipse scenes, which means NOT having monster-sized red Moons looming out of proportion and in the wrong place over a landscape. Use Photoshop to inform, not deceive.

August 3, 2015August 3, 2015

Moonlight on the Prairie

I present a short time-lapse vignette of scenes shot under moonlight on the Alberta prairie.

The movie linked below features sequences shot July 29 and 30, 2015 on beautifully clear moonlit nights at locations south of Bow Island, Alberta, on the wide open prairie. The three-minute video features two photogenic pioneer sites.

The church is the now derelict St. Anthony’s Church, a former Roman Catholic church built in 1911 by English and Russian-German immigrants. It served a dwindling congregation until as late as 1991 when it closed. At that time workers found a time capsule from 1915 with names of the priest and parisioners of the day.

The wood church seems to have been largely neglected since.

In the summer of 2014 the Church suffered its latest indignity when the iron cross on its steeple tower was stolen. I also shot in the pioneer cemetery of the Church.

The other site is a nearby farmhouse with photogenic textures and accompanied by rustic out buildings that are barely managing to stand.

Illumination was from a waxing gibbous Moon, just 1 to 2 days before the infamous “Blue Moon” of July 31. Its bright light turned the sky blue, and lit the landscape with the same quality as sunlight, because it is sunlight!

Enlarge the video to full screen for the full HD version.

For the technically inclined:

I shot the scenes with three cameras – a Canon 60Da, Canon 6D, and Nikon D750.

The Nikon, with a 24mm lens, was on the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero Dolly and Stage R panning unit, while the 60Da, with a 14mm lens, was on the compact Radian panning unit. The third camera, the 6D, with a 16-35mm lens, was on a fixed tripod for the star trail sequences and stills.

The music is by Adi Goldstein (AGSoundtrax.com), whose music I often use in my sequences. It just seems to work so well, and is wonderfully melodic and powerful. Thank you, Adi!

To process the several thousand frames that went into the final movie, I used Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, supplemented by the latest Version 4.2 of LRTimelapse (lrtimelapse.com). Its new “Visual Deflicker” workflow does a beautiful job smoothing out frame-to-frame flickering in sequences shot in twilight under darkening lighting conditions. Thank you Gunther!

For the star trail sequences and the still images above I used the Advanced Stacker Actions from StarCircleAcademy.com. Unlike most other stacking programs, the Stacker Actions work from within Adobe Bridge and Photoshop directly, using the processed Raw images, with no need to create intermediate sets of JPGs. Thank you Steven!

July 2, 2015

Waterton Lakes by Moonlight

Mountain scenes take on a new look when photographed by moonlight.

Last week I spent four wonderful nights shooting the landscapes of Waterton Lakes National Park under the light of the waxing Moon. For two of the evenings I taught small groups of photographers eager to learn how to extend their photo skills into the night.

We shot at Red Rock Canyon both nights, an ideal spot for its many composition options for shooting both toward and away from the Moon.

The lead image is a view looking up the canyon, with Cassiopeia in view. Always nice to have a recognizable constellation so well positioned.

The image just above looks toward the Moon, partly hidden by colourful clouds diffracting the moonlight. A student is at left trying out a composition.

Here, students, silhouetted by the Moon, use the footbridge as their vantage point to photograph moonlight on the canyon waters and walls.

My workshops were part of the annual Waterton Wildflower Festival. So, a number of us tried to shoot flowers by moonlight, no easy task considering the wide apertures and shallow depth of field usually required, even under bright moonlight.

But the photo above is my take on summer alpine flowers in a meadow with the iconic Anderson Peak in the distance.

Three nights were wonderfully clear. But my first night, set aside for scouting locations for the Workshops, was beset by some clouds. However, I made use of them to create a moody moonlit cloudscape panorama of the Big Dipper over Blakiston Valley.

I’ll be back in Waterton in September for the Wildlife Festival. We won’t try to shoot bears by moonlight! One did wander by at the start of our Saturday Workshop!

Instead, we’ll concentrate on photographing the Milky Way. That’s Friday, September 18.

July 1, 2015

Waterton Lakes in the Twilight

Happy Canada Day! From one of the most scenic places in the country.

I spent a wonderful four days and nights last week at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, with near perfect weather conditions.

For one, the infamous winds of Waterton weren’t blowing, allowing me to shoot the iconic Prince of Wales Hotel reflected in the calm waters of Middle Waterton Lake at Driftwood Beach, with the waxing Moon above in the twilight sky.

Earlier in the evening, I was at the Maskinonge Overlook shooting some video for upcoming tutorials. At sunset I shot this image, below, of the Moon above the alpenglow of the last rays of sunlight.

The rising waxing gibbous Moon in the sunset sky over Maskinonge Wetlands at Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, June 2015. The last rays of sunset are illuminating the peaks in alpen glow. This is an HDR stack of 3 exposures with the Canon 60Da and 16-35mm lens.

Happy Canada Day!

And don’t forget to look west for the ongoing Venus-Jupiter conjunction. I missed the best night last night, June 30 – clouds! But here’s hoping for tonight.

June 1, 2015June 2, 2015

Night of the Space Station

The Space Station is now continuously lit by sunlight, allowing me to capture dusk-to-dawn passages of the ISS.

On the night of May 31/June 1 I was able to shoot four passages of the International Space Station on successive orbits, at 90-minute intervals, from dusk to dawn.

The first passage, at 11:06 p.m., was low across the south. It’s the image at top.

Then at 12:45 a.m. the Space Station came over again, now directly overhead. It’s the image above. The Moon is the bright glow at bottom.

One orbit later, at 2:21 a.m., the Station came over in another overhead pass in the bright moonlight.

The final passage of the night came at 3:55 a.m. as the sky was brightening with dawn twilight and the Moon was setting. This was another passage across the south, and made for the most photogenic pass of the night.

Here’s an edited movie of the four passes, with a little music just for fun.

Seeing the Space Station on not one but two, three, or even four orbits in one night is possible at my latitude of 50 degrees north around summer solstice because the Station is now continuously lit by sunlight — the Sun never sets from the altitude of the ISS.

When the ISS should be entering night, sunlight streaming over the north pole still lights the Station at its altitude of 400 km.

To shoot the time-lapse clips and stills I used 8mm and 15mm fish-eye lenses, and a 14mm ultra-wide lens.

The bright moonlight made it possible to use short 2- to 4-second exposures, allowing me to record enough frames at each passage to make the little movies of the ISS flying across the sky. Keep in mind, to the eye, the ISS looks like a bright star. Some image processing trickery adds the tapering trails.

I used the Advanced Stacker Actions from StarCircleAcademy.com to create the trail effects, and to stack the time-lapse frames into single composite still images. The gaps in the trails are from the one second interval between frames.

May 3, 2015

Evening Stars Over the Red Deer River

Mercury and Venus shine as “evening stars” over the Red Deer River in southern Alberta.

What a fine night this was for nightscape shooting. Mercury and Venus are both now about as high as they will get for the year in the evening sky from my western Canadian latitude.

Venus is easy to spot as the brilliant object in the west. But Mercury is more elusive. You can see it here low in the twilight glow and much dimmer than Venus.

The photo illustrates how far each of the two inner planets swings away from the Sun in our skies, and why Mercury has its reputation for being difficult to sight. Also, it appears at its best for only a couple of weeks at a time. By mid-May it will be gone.

Venus, however, continues to dominate our western sky for the next two months.

I shot the main photo from the deck of a rickety wooden bridge over the Red Deer River near Dorothy, Alberta, just off Highway 10 east of Drumheller in the Badlands.

The image is a high-dynamic-range “HDR” stack of five exposures.

Shortly after taking the lead photo, I drove west to the Atlas Coal Mine to shoot it by the light of the now high and nearly Full Moon. Mercury can still be seen low and to the right of the historic tipple building. Venus shines above it.

This is a single 25-second exposure at ISO 800.

The Atlas Coal Mine is now a National Historic Site and is the last standing from what was once a booming coal mining centre in the Red Deer River Valley.

Now, mostly dinosaur fossils are unearthed here.

April 8, 2015April 8, 2015

Nightscapes at Double Arch

The iconic Double Arch looks great under dark skies, moonlight, or painted with artificial light.

Last night, I returned to the Double Arch at Arches National Park, to capture a star trail series, starting from the onset of darkness at 9:30 p.m., and continuing for 2.5 hours until midnight, an hour after moonrise at 11:00 p.m. The lead image is the result.

I think it turned out rather well.

The Big Dipper is just streaking into frame at top right, as I knew it would from shooting here the night before. The bright streak at upper left is Jupiter turning into frame at the end of the sequence. Note how the shadow of the moonlit foreground arch matches the shape of the background arch.

On the technical end, the star trail composite is a stack of 160 frames, each 45 seconds at f/2.8 and ISO 3200, with the Canon 6D and 14mm lens. The foreground, however, comes from a stack of 8 frames taken toward the end of the shoot, as the moonlight was beginning to light the arches. An additional 45-second exposure taken a couple of minutes after the last star trail frame adds the star-like points at the “head” of the star trail streaks.

I used the excellent Advanced Stacker Actions from StarCircleAcademy to do the stacking in Photoshop.

Before starting the star trail set, I took some initial short-exposure nightscapes while the sky was still dark. The result is the above image, of Double Arch in a dark sky. Passing car headlights provided some rather nice accent illumination.

On such a fine night I thought others might be there as well. Arches is a very popular place for nightscape imaging.

Sure enough, 6 others came and went through the early evening before moonrise. We had a nice time chatting about gear and techniques.

As expected, a few photographers came armed with bright lights for artificially lighting the arches. I kept my camera running, knowing any illumination they shone on the foreground wouldn’t affect my star trails, and that I’d mask in the foreground from frames taken after moonrise.

Here’s one frame from my star trail sequence where one photographer headed under the arch to light it for his photos. It did make for a nice scene – a human figure adds scale and dimension.

However, I always find the light from the LED lamps too artificial and harsh, and comes from the wrong direction to look natural. I also question the ethics of blasting a dark sky site with artificial light.

On a night like this I’d rather wait until moonrise and let nature provide the more uniform, warmer illumination with natural shadows.

As an example, I took this image the night before using short exposures in the moonlight to capture the Big Dipper over Double Arch. When I shot this at 11 p.m. I had the site to myself. Getting nature to provide the right light requires the photographer’s rule of “waiting for the light.”

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Moonlighting at Monument Valley

The Full Moon rises behind the famous Mitten buttes at Monument Valley.

I spent a fabulous weekend capturing sunsets and nightscapes at the iconic Monument Valley on the Utah/Arizona border, the photogenic outdoor set of dozens movies over the decades.

On the eve of the total lunar eclipse I shot the nearly Full Moon rising behind the West (left) and East (centre) Mittens and Merrick Butte (at right). On the evening of Friday, April 3 the Moon rose and sat amid the sunlit clouds with the Sun still up.

The alignment that would place the Moon directly opposite the Sun to create the eclipse was still 11 hours away.

Note how the butte’s shadows point almost, but not quite directly, at the nearly Full Moon. They point at the place in the sky the Moon would be before dawn at the end of that night.

Indeed, on eclipse morning on Saturday, April 4 the Moon set exactly as the Sun rose (see my photos in my previous blog).

But on eclipse eve the Moon rose 30 minutes before the Sun set, providing a chance to catch the Moon behind the still sunlit red buttes.

I shot this image about 20 minutes after sunset on April 3, so the foreground is now in shadow but the Moon appears in a more richly tinted twilight sky.

Later on April 3 I captured this scene, with the Tear Drop and Rock Door Mesas now lit by a bright Full Moon, and with the stars of the winter sky setting into the west. Canis Major and Orion are at left, while Taurus, including the Pleiades star cluster and brilliant Venus, are at right.

The Orion & Venus image is a 2-panel panorama.

On the evening of April 4, clouds thwarted plans for a long star trail sequence above a moonlit foreground.

Instead, I shot toward the Moon and clouds, to capture subtle moonbeams radiating out from the Moon, now some 14 hours after the eclipse, rising behind Merrick Butte. I shot this from the dusty Loop Road that winds through the valley floor.

Instead of lots of images for a star trail composite, I was content to shoot this one image, catching the Big Dipper in a brief hole in the drifting clouds, hanging in the sky over the West Mitten butte. The foreground is lit by the partly obscured Full Moon. The long exposure streaks the moving clouds.

Night or day, it’s hard not to take a great photo here, clouds or not!

On my final evening at Monument Valley, high winds common to the area, blowing dust, and the closed Loop Road, scuttled plans again for long star trail sequences from the valley floor.

So on Easter Sunday, April 5, I settled for a panorama from the classic viewpoint showing the setting Sun lighting the buttes and mesas of Monument Valley.

It is an amazing place, but one that still requires patience to wait out the clouds and dust storms.

January 29, 2015January 29, 2015

The Old Hearst Church in Moonlight

The Big Dipper and the Pole Star shine above the moonlit historic Hearst Church.

Tuesday was a productive evening of shooting in the moonlight. One of the best from the night pictures the Hearst Church in the rustic town of Pinos Altos in the Gila Forest of southern New Mexico.

The Big Dipper stars shine at right, with the Pointer stars in the Bowl aiming at Polaris above the Church. Illumination is from a waxing quarter Moon and from some decorative lights in the yard next door across the street.

The Hearst Church was opened in May 1898 and indeed is named for the famous Hearst family. Money to build the church was raised by the local mining families with a major donation from Phoebe Hearst, wife of the mining magnate and senator George Hearst. Phoebe was also mother to newspaper tychoon William Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Orson Welles’ movie Citizen Kane. Gold that decorates Hearst’s mansion in California came from the family mine near Pinos Altos.

As the mining boom went bust the Methodist church lost its pastor then its congregation. It is now an art gallery and home to the Grant County Art Guild. See their website for details on the historic church.

While I know many of my blog’s followers enjoy the photos for their own sake, lots of folks also like to learn more about the technical aspects of the images.

So with this blog, and selected others in future, I’ll present a bit more of the “how-to” information.

How the Image Was Shot and Processed

Taking the image could not have been simpler. It is a single 45-second exposure at f/2.8 with the 24mm lens and Canon 6D at ISO 800, on a static tripod, about as basic as you get for nightscape shooting. There is no fancy stacking or compositing.

The trick is still in the processing, however. Here is a breakdown of the Photoshop CC 2014 file and its various layers. Every aspect of the processing is non-destructive. No pixels were ever harmed in the process. Every adjustment can be tweaked and modified after the fact.

< Star spikes top layer added with “Astronomy Tools” actions from Noel Carboni.

< Sharpening layer created from stamping the final layers into one layer using the Command-Option-Shift-E command, then a High Pass filter applied, blended with Soft Light and masked to sharpen just the ground.

< Adjustment layers for colour, brightness & contrast, and levels, applied to the sky and ground separately with masks, created using Quick Selection Tool and Refine Edge.

< A Clone & Heal layer for wiping out the power lines & power pole, using the Patch & Spot Healing Tools.

< The base image, opened from the developed Raw file as a Smart Object, with noise reduction and sharpening applied as Smart Filters.

I know this won’t explain all the processing steps but I hope it provides some idea of what goes into a nightscape.

All this and much more will be explained in an upcoming half-day “Photoshop for Astronomy” Workshop I’m presenting Saturday, May 9. If you are in the Calgary, Alberta area, consider joining us. For details and to register, see the All-Star Telescope web page.

Also, my ebook featured below has all the details on shooting and processing images like these.

Clear skies and happy shooting!

January 5, 2015January 6, 2015

Comet on the Rocks

Comet Lovejoy glows above the granite spires of City of Rocks State Park.

With clouds forecast for the rest of the week I made the best of it tonight and headed out to my favourite local spot for nightscape images, the City of Rocks State Park on Highway 180 between Silver City and Deming, New Mexico.

It was a quick photo session tonight. I arrived at just the right time to catch the comet and Orion rising behind the rock formations, with the moonlight beginning to illuminate the rocky rims.

The comet is the small green spot just right of centre at the top. It is now climbing quite high in the southern sky as it comes up north. I could see it easily in binoculars as a large fuzzy spot and I thought I could just make it out with unaided eyes once I knew just where to look.

This will be a fine comet for binoculars once the Moon gets out of the way later this week, though you will need to be at a dark site. The comet is diffuse and will be utterly washed out by city lights. This is no Hale-Bopp! But as comets go, Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 is a nice one.

January 4, 2015January 4, 2015

Comet Lovejoy in the Moonlight

Sunday night, January 4, proved stunningly clear, ideal for seeing and shooting Comet Lovejoy in the moonlight.

Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) is moving rapidly north and this week sits just west of Orion. To capture it tonight I went out to the City of Rocks State Park, seeking a scenic foreground, with Orion rising with the comet.

The Full Moon is just off frame at left, unavoidably glaring into the frame.

Comet Lovejoy appears as a small green fuzzy spot at upper right.

In this view I had to crop Orion in order to fit in the landscape and the comet, at upper right. Three short aircraft contrails appear at the bottom. The Full Moon illuminates the southern New Mexico landscape.

In the coming week, with the Moon rising later each night, and the comet climbing higher, it will become much easier to see in a dark sky.

However, while Comet Lovejoy might be technically visible to the unaided eye, you really need binoculars to pick it out. We’ll see if it sports much of a tail once we sight it again in a dark moonless sky.

November 7, 2014November 7, 2014

Sagittarius Setting over the City of Rocks

Sagittarius, with Mars, set behind the granite pillars of City of Rocks State Park.

From home in Canada the summer constellation of Sagittarius is long gone by November. But here, from a latitude of 32° north, Sagittarius, now with Mars shining amid its “teapot” shape of stars, still shines in the southwest.

This was the scene last night in the early evening, as the Full Moon lit the rock formations at New Mexico’s City of Rocks State Park. Sagittarius is above the rocks at left. Some bright bits of the Milky Way just manage to appear in the clear, bright sky lit blue by moonlight.

This view looks northwest, with the stars of the Big Dipper just clearing the rocks at right.

In two weeks, with the Moon gone from the sky, the local astronomy club hosts one of its monthly star parties at the Park, making use of the public observatory in the Park, near the “Orion” group campground area – all the campsites are named for constellations and stars.

This is a very sky-friendly Park.

October 8, 2014

Red Moon over Writing-on-Stone

The red eclipsed Moon shines over the Milk River, with Orion over the Sweetgrass Hills.

This was the scene at 4:45 this morning, October 8, from my observing site for the lunar eclipse, Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta.

The eclipsed red Moon shines at far right over the Milk River and sandstone formations of Writing-on-Stone Park, home to ancient petroglyphs, and a sacred site to First Nations people.

At left are the Sweetgrass Hills across the border in Montana. Above shine the stars of Orion, with his Dog Star Sirius below. Above is Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades cluster.

The night was fairly clear for the hour of totality, though with high haze fuzzing the stars and Moon. But considering the cloud I had driven 3 hours to escape I was happy.

Here I am in a 5:30 a.m. selfie by starlight and moonlight, with the clouds I had escaped now rolling in to cover the Moon as it began to emerge from Earth’s shadow.

No matter. I had captured what I had come for: the nightscape above (with a 14mm lens), and close-ups shot through this telescope gear, one of which I featured in my previous post.

September 19, 2014

Milky Way Over the Icefields

The Milky Way towers over the moonlit peaks around the Columbia Icefields

Last Sunday was a productive night, resulting in several 5 Star images in my catalog!

This is another, shot shortly after the Galaxy and Glacier image. In that image the sky was still dark. In this image the sky is beginning to light up with moonlight from the rising waxing Moon.

The peaks are being lit by the Moon, though the valley below is still in moonshadow.

What light there is on the foreground moraines is from starlight, and from the unfortunate wash from unshielded sodium vapour lights on the Icefields Centre. They proudly claim their lights are dark-sky friendly. They aren’t! This is proof.

The top image is a stack of tracked (for the sky) and untracked (for the ground) exposures to create a deep, rich Milky Way over a sharp landscape.

The image is helped by being shot with a filter-modified camera that records the red nebulas along the Milky Way better than stock cameras. That’s why the North America Nebula at top in Cygnus really pops!

This 360° panorama image is a stitch of 8 segments at 45° spacings, each untracked, shot in rapid succession with the same 15mm ultra-wide lens I used for the main image, again oriented portrait, with the frames stitched in PTGui.

I shot it on the road, literally, that leads down to the toe of Athabasca Glacier.

I took the pan just after the image at top, so the peaks are lit more and the sky is bluer with moonlight. The Moon itself is still behind the mountains to the left (east) about to clear the ridge moments after I finished this pan. It was a busy night of getting shots timed right!

But waning Moon nights are superb for nightscape imaging as they provide both dark and moonlit skies but without the immense light of a Full Moon that tends to wash out the sky too much. Waning Moon nights are great for shooting landscape features to the west, as they get lit by the rising Moon after midnight.

P.S.: A tip – hit “Tips and Techniques” under Category at left for more blogs with tips and techniques!

September 17, 2014September 17, 2014

Andromeda over Mt. Andromeda

The stars of Andromeda and the autumn sky shine over Mount Andromeda.

This is a photo I’ve been after for several years, one practical to take only in early autumn. Last Sunday night, the skies were ideal.

This is the constellation of Andromeda over its namesake peak, Mt. Andromeda, at right.

The mountain was named in the 1930s by pioneering mountaineer Rex Gibson for the mythological princess. Andromeda is represented in the sky by an arc of stars, here at top centre, stretching from the Square of Pegasus, at right of centre, to Perseus, at left. Just above the main stars of Andromeda lies the oval glow of the Andromeda Galaxy.

The bright object at lower left is the overexposed waning quarter Moon rising in the southeast. Above it are the Pleiades rising.

I shot this from the Forefield Trail just up from the parking lot for the Toe of the Glacier walk to Athabasca Glacier, just off frame to the right. The hills in the foreground are the lateral moraines from the rapidly retreating glacier.

P.S. This my 500th blog post, a major milestone I would think! Thanks for being a fan and reading along. I hope you are enjoying my tours of what is truly an amazing sky.

September 8, 2014September 9, 2014

Stars on Ice – The Columbia Icefields by Moonlight

The stars trail over the glaciers of the Columbia Icefields.

What an amazing night this was! You rarely get pristine cloudless skies over the Icefields. Some cloud is almost always blowing off the ice. But last Saturday in Jasper National Park was as clear as it gets.

The Moon was bright, as a waxing gibbous just off frame at left. It lit the landscape like it was day.

I shot with two cameras, one doing a time-lapse motion control sequence panning across the scene. The other was a fixed camera shooting 20-second exposures at 1-second intervals. The resulting frames from the fixed camera, 270 in this case, are multi-purpose:

– I stacked about 100 of them to make the star trail composite above. Two frames supplied the stars at the beginning and end of the trails. Another single frame supplied the ground, to avoid the shadows being blurred by the Moon’s motion if you used the ground composited from all 100 frames.

– I can also take the full set of 270 frames and sequence them into a time-lapse movie of the stars moving over the landscape.

Before beginning the time-lapse sequences I shot this 180° panorama, made of 5 segments stitched in PTGui software. It extends from the southwest at left, where the Milky Way is barely visible, to the north at right, with the Big Dipper over the Icefields Parkway.

Click on it for a bigger view.

This is the camera setup, with the camera on the right taking the star trail image I feature at top.

The Athabasca Glacier is at left, the Stutfield Glacier at right.

Midnight under moonlight is when to see the Icefields! This is the lower parking lot, at the start of the trail up to Athabasca Glacier. This is packed with cars, RVs and buses by day, but at night I was the only one there.

September 8, 2014

Stars over Mt. Edith Cavell

The stars of the summer sky shine over the North Face of Mt. Edith Cavell.

The valley below Mt. Edith Cavell in Jasper National Park is one of the most impressive locations in the Canadian Rockies. At few other sites do you get the sense of standing at the foot of a vertical mountain face.

I shot this view last Friday night, when the waxing Moon was behind the mountain, lighting the clouds and sky but not the mountain and valley directly.

But enough scattered light came from the sky to light the foreground and mountain face to make a nice photo with detail in both earth and sky.

Use of highlight and shadow recovery in Adobe Camera Raw also helps a lot!

This view is a 360° ground-to-zenith panorama I shot earlier in the evening in twilight. It’s from the Trail of the Glacier path, where the path crosses Cavell Creek.

Mt. Edith Cavell was named in 1916 after the World War One nurse who was executed by the Germans for assisting allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium.

September 5, 2014

Pyramid Island Sky Panorama

The sky presents a panoramic show from Pyramid Island in Jasper National Park.

What a wonderful place to watch the stars. Last night I walked out to Pyramid Island in Jasper, via the historic boardwalk built in the 1930s. The site provides a panorama view around the lake and sky.

To the left is the “mainland.” Just left of centre the waxing gibbous Moon is setting over Pyramid Lake.

To the right of centre, the boardwalk leads out the small island, with Pyramid Mountain behind it.

To the right of the frame, a faint aurora glows to the northeast over the still waters of the lake.

This is a 360° panorama shot with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens in portrait orientation, with the segments stitched with PTGui software.

After shooting some panoramas I walked to the end of the island and shot this view looking north and northwest to Pyramid Mountain. The Big Dipper is to the right of the peak, and the aurora lights up the northern horizon at right.

As I shot these images, the night was absolutely quiet. Until the wolves began to howl at the north end of the lake, in mournful howls that echoed across the waters.

It was one of the most spine-chilling moments I’ve experienced in many years of shooting landscapes at night.

September 4, 2014

Star Trails over Athabasca Falls

The autumn stars rise in trails over Athabasca Falls and Mt. Kerkeslin in Jasper National Park.

Last night was a good one for shooting nightscapes in Jasper. Skies cleared for a beautiful moonlit night, ideal for nightscape shooting.

I went to Athabasca Falls, a popular scenic attraction in Jasper but deserted after dark. I set up cameras at the usual overlook, shooting both a time-lapse and star trail set.

The main image above is the result of stacking 100 images in the star trail set. I used the Advanced Stacker Plus actions from Star Circle Academy.

The foreground comes from one image, shot early in the sequence when the Moon lit more of the landscape. The Falls themselves remained in shadow, as I had expected from my lighting angle calculation and knowing the site.

The star trail image shows the autumn stars of Andromeda, Cassiopeia ad Perseus rising over Mt. Kerkeslin, the famous backdrop to Athabasca Falls on the Athabasca River, making its way to the Arctic Ocean

This image is a 4-segment panorama I shot earlier in the evening in the twilight, with the waxing Moon over the Athabasca River.

In the early 1800s, after explorer, astronomer, and fur trader David Thompson had to abandon his original route over the Rockies at Howse Pass, he came north, and followed the Athabasca and Whirlpool Rivers up over the Athabasca Pass, his new main route to the B.C. interior.

August 16, 2014

Twilight and Moonlight at Waterfowl Lakes

Peaks of the Continental Divide reflect in the calm waters of Lower Waterfowl Lake.

These images provide a sense of what a beautiful night this was, last Monday on the Icefields Parkway in Banff.

The evening started with a super-clear twilight providing subtle shadings – from the last glow of sunset on the horizon, through the “twilight purple” above, to the deep blue of the darkening sky at top.

The purple hue comes from red sunlight still illuminating the upper atmosphere and blending with the blue sky from the usual scattering of short blue wavelengths.

The twilight scene is a high-dynamic range blend of several exposures processed with Photoshop’s HDR Pro as a 32-bit file in Adobe Camera Raw.

Taking different frames from the same set that I used to capture the Space Station I created this star trail scene, of the western stars setting over Mt. Cephren. Light from the one-day-past Full Moon illuminated the peaks that line the Continental Divide.

The star trail scene is a composite – of many images stacked to create the star trails, blended with a masked single image from the set to supply the landscape.

For the star trail stacking I used the excellent Advanced Stacker Plus actions from Star Circle Academy. To separate and mask out the sky from the landscape image I used Photoshop’s Quick Selection tool and its wonderful Refine Mask function.

August 15, 2014

Moonbow at Bow Falls

A small moonbow forms in the light of the full “super moon” at Bow Falls in Banff.

This was Sunday night, August 10, on the night of the bright “super moon” that lit the landscape. In this case, I was at Bow Falls, a popular tourist spot in the townsite of Banff below the Banff Springs Hotel.

However, by night only a handful of people appeared, including two who stayed still long enough to record on one frame, above.

The sky, however, is made of many frames, exposed over an hour to add the star trails. But the landscape is from one exposure, and includes a short arc of a moonbow, a rainbow created from moonlight.

In an alternative version, sans moonbow, I shot one short and several long exposures to capture the stars of the Big Dipper streaking over the falls.

These are two more examples of how magical the mountains are by moonlight. And how quiet the usually busy tourist spots are!

August 13, 2014August 16, 2014

Meteors and Space Stations over Mt. Cephren

A couple of Perseid meteors streak across the moonlit sky above Mt. Cephren in Banff National Park.

The night before the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower was very clear for the first couple of hours. On Monday, August 11, I positioned myself at the shore of Lower Waterfowl Lake, at a roadside viewpoint on the Icefields Parkway in Banff National Park, Alberta.

I had two cameras going, one on a fixed tripod aimed west in hope of catching some meteors in a few frames. Two did, and the main image is a composite of those two frames, as the Perseids shoot over the pyramid peak of Mt. Cephren.

Later, the Space Station also flew over, accompanied by the European ATV cargo ship, captured here in a stack of 18 frames from the 555-frame time-lapse, showing their pass from west to east (bottom to top) of the composite image. The gaps are from when the shutter was closed for 1 second between the 15-second-long exposures with the 14mm ultra-wide lens.

In all, it was a warm and beautiful night, with the normally busy viewpoint all to myself all night, under the light of the nearly Full Moon.

The mountains by moonlight are truly magical.

August 11, 2014

Super Moonrise over Banff

A much-publicized “super moon” rises over Mt. Rundle and Banff townsite.

I joined a small crowd of moon watchers at the Mt. Norquay viewpoint last night, Sunday, August 10, to view the rising of the super moon, the closest Full Moon of 2014.

Of course, no one could possibly detect that this moon was any bigger or brighter than any other moon. Nevertheless, everyone saw an impressive sight and went away happy.

I shot this image at the end of a 700-frame time-lapse, at about 10:15 p.m. This is an HDR “high-dynamic-range” stack of 8 exposures, from dark and underexposed (to capture the bright sky around the Moon) to bright and overexposed (to capture the foreground and dark trees).

Yes, I have cranked up the HDR effect a little, to beyond “natural.” But I think the result looks striking and brings out the structure in the clouds that hid the Moon at first.

Think what you will of “super moons,” they get people outside, looking up and marvelling. In this case, the PR prompted a moonwatch party on a fine summer Sunday evening in one of the most scenic places on the planet.

August 10, 2014August 11, 2014

Super Moonrise at Bow Lake

The nearly Full Moon rises over Bow Lake, Banff then lights up the landscape.

Saturday night was a stunning night to shoot nightscapes in Banff. Skies were mostly clear, allowing the nearly Full Moon, a day before the much-hyped “SuperMoon,” to light the landscapes.

I began last night’s shoot at Bow Lake looking south toward the rising Moon over the mountain fireweed flowers.

Shooting the other way toward Bow Glacier reveals this moonlit scene, in a frame I shot as part of the set up for a time-lapse movie. I had three cameras going, each shooting about 350 frames. The computer is processing them as I type. Still-image “nightscapes” like these are so much easier!

When I arrived I thought I wouldn’t be surprised to find other time-lapsers present, at such a great spot on a perfect night.

Sure enough, Shane Black from Ohio was setting up for a twilight shoot with much the same gear I use – a Dynamic Perception Stage Zero dolly system and eMotimo 2-axis motion controller. I was able to help Shane out by supplying a battery to power the rig when his was dying. Glad to help a fellow time-lapser! Good luck on the rest of your cross-country tour!

July 12, 2014

Super Moonrise at Red Rock Coulee

The Full Moon rises over the sandstone formations of Red Rock Coulee, Alberta.

This was moonrise – a super Moonrise – on Friday, July 11, 2014.

Publicized as yet another “super moon,” this moonrise was certainly excellent for me, with superb skies at Red Rock Coulee in southern Alberta. There’s no way anyone would be able to detect the fact this Moon was a little closer and larger than most Full Moons of 2014. But it was still a fine sight.

Here, you see it sitting in the pink Belt of Venus fringing the dark blue band of Earth’s shadow rising in the east just after sunset. The already red rocks are lit by the warm light of the western twilight.

The main photo is an HDR stack of 6 exposures, to capture the range in brightness from bright sky to darker foreground.

This night, as it is for a week or so at mid-month, reddish Mars was sitting just above blue-white Spica in Virgo. They are visible here as a double star in the moonlit southwestern sky. Saturn is to the left. This is a single exposure.

It was another perfect night – warm, dry and bug free, for 3 hours of moonlight time-lapse shooting, as well as taking these still images.

July 11, 2014July 11, 2014

Sunset over the Lonely Log Cabin

The clouds paint the sky at sunset over a pioneer cabin in the Cypress Hills.

This is a scene the original resident of this cabin would have enjoyed – and painted.

This lonely log cabin in the Battle Creek valley was built by Robert David Symons, renowned as a rancher, naturalist, game warden, and painter, in the style of western artists such as Charlie Russell.

The cabin looks like it dates from the pioneer days of the first European settlement of the area, in the late 19th century. But Symons settled here and built this log cabin in 1939, during the time he worked as a game warden in the Hills, posted at the Battle Creek Ranger Station. He lived in the cabin for only three years before selling it to Albert and Sylvia Noble in 1942.

The Nobles expanded the cabin to accommodate their family. They lived here for 10 years, working a sawmill in the area.

Today the cabin is a scenic stop on the rough and often muddy Battle Creek Road that winds from the Alberta to the Saskatchewan side of Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. Travelling it is like being back in the 1940s, when roads were no better than improved cart tracks.

I spent an evening here two nights ago on a perfect summer night, shooting the sunset and then the cabin scene by moonlight using time-lapse cameras and gear.

The main scene at top is a high dynamic range stack of 6 images to preserve details in the bright sky and dark foreground.

The self-portrait is a single shot taken by moonlight. Mars and Spica are just setting as a pair of stars over the hills across the valley.

It was a magical night in the Hills.

July 4, 2014

Waxing Moon on the Water

The waxing crescent Moon shines over water at Bow Valley Provincial Park, Alberta.

What an excellent evening this was. On July 2 I was at a newly discovered spot, the Whitefish picnic area, in Bow Valley Provincial Park between Calgary and Canmore, Alberta.

I was there with colleagues doing a shoot for a promotional video for a project I’m involved with. But after the business shoot, I stuck around to take my own shots for time-lapse movies and still images.

In the scene above the Moon is reflected in the still waters of Middle Lake in the Park. It’s a high dynamic range stack of seven exposures.

Here, a little earlier in the evening is the scene on the banks of the Bow River, with the Moon over the swiftly flowing waters of the glacier-fed Bow. Its waters nourish much of southern Alberta, making farming, industry and life possible in an otherwise dry, rain-shadow climate.

Though a year ago its flood-swollen waters were bringing disaster to many people along the Bow.

This evening I shot motion-control time-lapses by the Bow, using some new gear that slowly pans or turns cameras during a time-lapse shoot. This is me playing with the new eMotimo controller, while the Dynamic Perception dolly does its thing below.

Lots of fun!

May 15, 2014May 16, 2014

McDougall Church under Moonlight

The historic pioneer church at Morley, Alberta stands under moonlight on the banks of the Bow.

Last night, after presenting a talk on time-lapse techniques to the Cochrane Camera Club, I headed west on Highway 1A to the historic McDougall Memorial United Church, long on my target list for time-lapse photography. It was Full Moon, which helped mask the lighting from nearby town lights and the urban sky glow of Cochrane and Calgary.

The wooden church stands on the benchlands north of the Bow River, near Morley, Alberta. Rev. George McDougall built it in 1875 to minister to the Cree. He lies buried on the Church grounds — that’s his grave in the foreground in the main image above, with the Full Moon shining above the headstone.

In this image, Mars stands directly above the Church steeple. The Full Moon shines in the clouds to the south. Both still images are frames from time-lapse movies, shot with two cameras. One was on the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero dolly, the other was a static tripod-mounted camera.

This little compilation shows the movies I shot last night, under moonlight on the banks of the Bow. It may take a moment to load. I hope you enjoy it!

March 17, 2014

The Pull of the Moon

The Full Moon rises over the Pacific Ocean, exerting its pull on the ocean tides.

This was the scene last night, Monday, March 17, 2014 from the headlands at Woolgoolga, New South Wales, Australia. The views overlook the Pacific Ocean with the Full Moon rising. If the Moon looks a little odd, it’s because I took these images from “down under,” where the Moon appears upside down compared to what we northerners are familiar with.

However, no matter your hemisphere, the Moon exerts a tidal pull on the globe, which manifests itself most obviously as the twice-daily rise and fall of the ocean tides at shorelines like this. When I took these shots at moonrise, the tide was just past its minimum and was beginning to come in again, for a peak later that night with the Moon high in the north.

Moonrise at Woolgoolga, Australia #1

This image was from a few minutes earlier, with the Moon having just risen and looking a little more pale against the darkening twilight of the eastern horizon.

I’m in Australia for the next few weeks, to shoot lots of images of the southern autumn sky, skies permitting.

February 13, 2014February 13, 2014

Rings Around the Moon

An ice crystal halo surrounds the Moon while a jet contrail crosses the sky.

On our last nights earlier this week at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre we had a bright gibbous Moon in our sky (as did everyone in the world!). We also had high-altitude clouds filled with ice crystals, the source of the “ring around the Moon” effect. This is a lunar halo, created by moonlight shining through six-sided ice crystals. This halo exhibits rainbow-like colours as well.

But this night, conditions were also ideal for seeing the contrails from jets flying overhead on polar routes from Europe to North America. In the main image above, you can see the jet departing to the west at lower right. Its high-altitude contrail is casting a dark shadow onto the lower cloud deck.

This view, taken earlier in the evening shows a more pronounced lunar halo with a horizon-to-horizon contrail shooting straight across the Moon and also casting a shadow.

I used an 8mm fish-eye lens to capture this 360° image of the entire sky. I was able to shoot this image in shirt-sleeve comfort through the rooftop plexiglas viewing dome at the Centre.

In this image, taken outside at -25° C, the sky is clearer but still contains enough ice crystal cloud to create a bright lunar halo. When I took this image on February 9 the Moon was to the right of bright star-like Jupiter, and in the middle of the winter stars and constellations, such as Orion just below the Moon.

Lunar haloes can be seen at any season. On any night with a nearly Full Moon embedded in high haze, look up!

February 10, 2014February 10, 2014

Boreal Aurora

The northern lights – the aurora borealis – shine above the trees of the northern forest – the boreal forest.

This was the scene on Sunday night, February 9, 2014, as the aurora intensified for a few minutes making for a photogenic backdrop to the snow-covered pine trees of the boreal forest.

The landscape looks like daylight but is actually being lit by the light of the bright waxing Moon in the south. These scenes are looking north.

I shot these images as part of my stay at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre where I have been presenting enrichment lectures to two groups of tourists here to see the northern lights during week-long stays. Both groups have been successful in seeing the lights on at least one to two nights of their stay, with the displays usually appearing as sky-spanning arcs overhead.

Here I took the time to take a “selfie” under the northern lights, as the curtains began to wave early in the evening.

In all, it has been a fantastic experience, to witness the lights from a site right under the active auroral oval at 58° north.

January 1, 2014

Music Video – Sky Events of 2013

My 2-minute music video looks back at some of the celestial highlights of 2013, in images and videos I captured.

Some of the events and scenes I show were accessible to everyone who looked up. But some required a special effort to see.

• In 2013 we had a couple of nice comets though not the spectacle hoped for from Comet ISON.

• Chris Hadfield became a media star beaming videos and tweets from the Space Station. We on Earth could look up and see his home sailing through the stars.

• The sky hosted a few nice conjunctions of planets, notably Mars, Venus and Jupiter in late May.

• The Sun reached its peak in solar activity (we think!) unleashing solar storms and some wonderful displays of northern lights.

• Locally, record rain storms in Alberta unleashed floods of devastating consequences in June, with a much publicized super moon in the sky.

• For me, the summer proved a productive one for shooting the “star” of the summer sky, the Milky Way.

• But the year-end finale was most certainly the total eclipse of the Sun on November 3. Few people saw it. I did, from a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The video ends with that sight and experience, the finest the sky has to offer.

I hope you enjoy this music video mix of time-lapse, real-time video and still images, shot from Alberta, New Mexico and from the Atlantic.

You can watch a better quality version of this video at my Vimeo channel.

Clear skies for 2014!

December 29, 2013December 30, 2013

Time-Lapse – Alberta Skies 2013

It was a good year for time-lapse photography at home. Here’s my compilation of Alberta time-lapses in a 3-minute music video.

For a year-end look back at 2013 I assembled these highlights of my year of shooting time-lapse movies of the Alberta sky, by day and night.

I’ve included clips shot around home in rural southern Alberta, and further afield at popular photo spots around the province such as Waterton Lakes National Park, Banff, Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, and Cypress Hills Provincial Park.

I hope you enjoy it! Be sure to maximize the video screen and select HD. Or for a better grade version check out my Vimeo channel.

________________________________________________

Some technical background:

I shot all the frames for the movies (150 to 300 frames for each clip) with either a Canon 5D MkII or a Canon 60Da camera, equipped with various lenses from 8mm to 200mm. For many of the clips the cameras were on motion control devices: the Radian azimuth panning unit, an Orion TeleTrack mount, or a Dynamic Perception Stage Zero dolly unit. You see the latter in action behind the credits.

For image processing and movie assembly I used Adobe Camera Raw, Photoshop, LRTimeLapse, Sequence, Panolapse/RawBlend utility, and for some of the star trails either StarStax or Star Circle Academy’s Advanced Stacker Actions.

I demonstrate all these in my Nightscapes workshops. The next one is in Edmonton, January 25!

To edit the movie I used the new OS10 Mavericks iMovie.

December 16, 2013

Venus in the Moonlight

Venus blazes brightly in the moonlit sky in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona.

This was the view last night, from Massai Point at the summit of the Chiricahua Mountains, looking southwest toward Venus in the blue moonlit sky. A bright waxing gibbous Moon provided the illumination, turning night into day in these long exposures.

I started my trek around Arizona and New Mexico here, at Chiricahua National Monument two weeks ago, on December 3, when I took some sunset shots.

I end my trip by returning to the Chiricahuas, but now with a nearly Full Moon in the sky.

I saw this scene two weeks ago but didn’t shoot it then. So I returned to capture Venus at the end of a moonlit road, shining above the volcanic rock formations that are the distinctive feature of the National Monument.

Now, it’s home to Alberta and the snow and cold.

December 15, 2013

Moon over the Chiricahuas

The waxing gibbous Moon rises over the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona.

This was the stunning scene on Sunday night, December 15, as I drove out to Chiricahua National Monument south of Willcox, Arizona for some moonlight photography. I stopped on Highway 186 to catch the colourful twilight in the east with the Moon rising over the desert mountains.

This image, taken a few minutes later, shows a darker sky but with more prominent crepuscular rays – shadows cast by distant clouds to the west where the Sun set. A photogenically placed windmill adds to the scene.

I love the contrast of Earth tones and twilight tints – a very desert-like palette.

December 14, 2013December 14, 2013

Geminid Meteors by Moonlight at the VLA

A Geminid meteor in the moonlight streaks over a dish of the Very Large Array.

Tonight I was out at the VLA, the iconic radio telescope array on the high desert Plains of San Agustin in central New Mexico. Over three hours I shot 325 frames for a time-lapse movie, hoping that a few would “catch a falling star” or two.

Tonight was peak night for the annual Geminid meteor shower so the chances were better than normal. The Geminids are one of the best performing meteor showers of the year.

Despite the peak occurring in the evening, conditions weren’t ideal. Light from the gibbous Moon lit the landscape nicely but did wash out many meteors. Of course, I just wanted some bright ones anyway! Also, clouds drifted in and out all evening – mostly in!

At top, you can see a faint Geminid meteor shooting up from Gemini the twins, visible rising at lower right, with Jupiter (now in Gemini) marking the constellation’s location.

In this image I moved the camera, but the array was also now pointed at a new target in the sky so the dishes were turned to look west. This shot captures another faint-ish Geminid streaking toward Orion, just right of centre.

I didn’t nab the grand and brilliant meteor I had hoped for but it was a wonderful moonlit evening under the stars, watching the dishes dance the night away.

December 10, 2013December 10, 2013

Orion and Canis Major Rising

Canis Major and Orion rise into the desert sky from southwest New Mexico.

We had an excellent week of observing at the Painted Pony Resort. We had cloud on parts of most nights, and frost on the calm nights and wind on the frostless nights. So viewing conditions weren’t ideal but they were way better than back home where temperatures plunged to -35° C at night and snow piled waist high.

The shot above is of Sirius and Canis Major, the hunting dog, rising into the early evening sky after the Moon had set.

Orion Rising over Adobe House v2 (New Mexico)

I took this image later in the week. It shows Orion rising above the main adobe house at the resort. His Belt points down to Sirius just coming up over the Peloncillo Mountains to the east. Moonlight provides the illumination and bands of airglow colour the sky.

All-Star Telescope is conducting another New Mexico Star Party next March, but most spaces are already filled. A couple of rooms may still be available in a newly renovated cottage off the main resort site. Check with Ken and Bev for details. I highly recommend the experience.

December 5, 2013December 8, 2013

Adobe Moon and Venus

The waxing crescent Moon shines above Venus and our adobe house in New Mexico.

Tonight, December 5, the clouds cleared in time for us to catch a glimpse of the crescent Moon above Venus, now at its most brilliant for the year.

They shine above the main house at the Painted Pony Resort where I am this week for a stint of astrophotography with a dozen other Canadians escaping winter up north. But it’s cold here, too – it might go down to freezing tonight. Horrors!

For this shot I made liberal use of shadow and highlight recovery at the Adobe Camera Raw stage and in Photoshop to recover as much detail as I could in the overexposed Moon at top. However, the long exposure nicely brings out the stars in the moonlit sky. I also like the contrast of pastel colours.

November 21, 2013

Sundiving Comet ISON – A Last Look

Comet ISON performs its dive toward the Sun, caught in the morning twilight.

This was the infamous and much-hyped Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) as it appeared this morning, November 21, 2013, a week before it performs its hairpin turn around the Sun.

The comet was easy to see in binoculars, though the camera picks up a bit more of its faint tail. ISON was much more photogenic a week ago when it was higher in a darker and moonless sky. But this morning I had to contend with bright moonlight from a waning Moon and the brightening dawn. The inset shows a blow up of just the comet.

ISON is dropping rapidly toward the Sun, making this perhaps the last sighting I’ll have of it until it reappears – we hope! – from behind the Sun in early December. If it survives its perihelion passage it might blossom into brilliance … or fade into obscurity. No one knows.

In the photo above, you can see Mercury at left, shining much brighter than ISON. It was brilliant as it rose into the southeast sky, with the elusive planet now about as well-placed as it gets as a “morning star” for us living at northern latitudes.

This morning I was able to shoot not one but two comets.

About half an hour before ISON hove into view I aimed the camera up almost overhead toward Ursa Major, to capture Comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1) as a bright cyan fuzzball with a short tail. Again, the photo brings out the tail – to the eye the comet was obvious in binoculars but appeared as just a fuzzy star.

I took both shots with the same gear: a 135mm telephoto lens on the Canon 5D MkII on an iOptron SkyTracker. The Lovejoy shot is a stack of 5 x 75 second exposures. The ISON shot is a 4-second exposure, with the colours and contrast boosted for prettiness.

This is certainly proving to be a year of comets. It would be nice if just one of them got really bright!

September 22, 2013

Big Dipper in the Badlands

The Big Dipper swings behind the Hoodoos in the Red Deer River badlands on a moonlit night.

Last night I headed north to the Red Deer River valley to shoot a time-lapse over the river with the badland hills lit by the rising waning Moon. After finishing that I stopped at the popular Hoodoos tourist attraction on Highway 10 east of Drumheller. I had the place to myself at midnight, and the photo ops around the moonlit hoodoos were many.

These formations form when harder capstone rock prevents the soft lower layers from eroding in the rain.

The Big Dipper was nicely positioned above the hills as it swings low across the northern horizon in autumn.

Here I aimed back toward the Moon, with its glare muted by high cloud, and backlighting the hoodoos. The stars of Perseus are rising at left. Unlike normal astrophotography, with nightscape work, and certainly time-lapse shooting, clouds can be a benefit.

This was a great spot to end an evening of nightscape shooting.

September 19, 2013

Harvest Moonset at Sunrise

The Harvest Full Moon sets into a prairie scene lit by the rising Sun.

This was the scene this morning, September 19, as the Full Moon set just after sunrise on a perfectly clear morning.

Clear, of course, but for the only clouds in the sky just where I wanted to shoot. However, in this case they did help make the scene, adding more colours to the western sky at dawn.

This was the true Harvest Moon, as moonset occurred only a couple of hours after the official moment of Full Moon. However, the setting moons of Wednesday night, September 18 and Thursday night, September 19 can both claim to also be the Harvest Moon, the Full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox.

I plan to shoot the Moon coming up again, 12 hours after it set for this photo, and right at sunset tonight.

September 17, 2013

Pleiades Rising Through the Old Farm Gate

The Pleiades rises beyond the old farm gate on a moonlit prairie night.

It’s been a wonderful few nights for nightscape photography, with a bright gibbous Moon lighting the golden prairie landscape. Skies have been clear and the nights warm, ideal for 3-hour shoots of old farmsteads and prairie scenes.

I’ve spent the last few nights at the abandoned farm near home, shooting time-lapses. This is from Monday night, and is one frame from a 360-frame dolly-motion time-lapse.

The Pleiades star cluster rises in the east over the old barn and farm gate. A car travels through the coulee, leaving a streak of headlights.

I hope the weather continues, so I can harvest some more images, making time-lapse “hay” while the Moon shines!

August 26, 2013

Big Dipper Over Castle Mountain

The famous stars of the Big Dipper dip behind the moonlit crags of Castle Mountain.

I just got back from four days in Banff, always a great place to be, even if it is cloudy. And it was!

I lost one night to forest fire smoke and another to rain clouds. On Saturday and Sunday nights I managed to seek out some clearer skies for nighttime shooting. This is a shot from Saturday, from a favourite photo stop on the Bow Valley Parkway overlooking the cliffs of Castle Mountain.

Despite the dew from rains earlier in the day I managed to shoot a time-lapse here. These two shots are frames from the movie which pans slowly across the scene.

This frame catches an Iridium satellite flare above the Dipper.

Light from the waning gibbous Moon, which was in and out of clouds itself, illuminates the scene and nicely cross-lights the Castle cliffs.

August 20, 2013August 20, 2013

Cassiopeia Rising in the Badlands

The stars of Cassiopeia rise behind hoodoo formations in the Alberta Badlands.

I took this Sunday night, August 18, as part of my shoot at Dinosaur Provincial Park. This is a particularly striking pair of hoodoos at the start of the Badlands Trail where I’ve been meaning to take some moonlit nightscapes for a couple of years.

This night’s conditions were perfect, with the “W” of Cassiopeia nicely placed, and the Moon providing excellent cross-lighting, under a clear blue sky, for the contrasting colours of earth and sky.

August 14, 2013

Wheatfield Moon

The waxing Moon shines above a ripening field of wheat on a prairie August evening.

A track winds off through the wheat field toward the western twilight sky, while a waxing Moon shines in the south.

This was the scene tonight just down the county road where I live, on a warm August night on the Canadian Prairies.

For this shot, I assembled a high dynamic range set from eight exposures taken over a range of 8 f-stops, to compress the wide range of brightness into the one photo. Even so, the Moon remains overexposed. But I like shooting these scenes in deep twilight for more saturated colours and for some stars in the sky.

July 29, 2013

Moonshadows and Sunbeams

The play of light and shadow in the open air create wonderful effects by night and day.

The Moon and Sun have each created some wonderful sky scenes of late, aided by clouds casting shadows and sunbeams across the sky.

Above, the rising waning Moon on Saturday night shone its warm light across the prairies. Clouds cast dark shadows diverging away from the Moon.

By day, clouds created the opposite effect. Holes in the clouds let through beams of sunlight, creating rays descending from the sky dancing across the land.

Both effects are technically known as crepuscular rays. You can read much more about the phenomenon at the wonderful Atmospheric Optics website. Clouds aren’t always the evil presence in the sky astronomers take them for. They can produce stunning effects. Just look up!

July 28, 2013

Canola Field Stars

Stars in a blue sky wheel above a ripening field of yellow canola.

It’s been a couple of fine nights of nightscape shooting under the light of the waning Moon and clear skies.

I’ve been shooting from no more exotic location than my local rural neighbourhood, travelling for 5 minutes to spots near one of the many canola fields growing nearby. I wanted to grab some nightscapes over the fields before they lose their yellow flowers and turn green.

The feature image above looking north is from a time-lapse sequence and stacks several images with the “comet trail” effect, to show the northern stars turning about the North Star.

This image, also a frame from another time lapse with a longer lens, shows the Big Dipper above that same field but in an exposure short enough to prevent the stars from trailing. You can now make out the familiar Dipper pattern.

This is a very Canadian scene, with the Big Dipper high in a northern latitude sky, and with the foreground crop a Canadian one – Canola was developed in the 1970s at the University of Manitoba. The “can” in canola stands for Canada. Pity there was no aurora.

July 17, 2013

Wild Rose Stars

The floral emblem of Alberta, the wild rose, appears in front of a twilit starry sky.

Last night was another good one on the Ranch! I had three cameras shooting from my log cabin front yard – I had no ambition to travel farther afield this night, after 6 nights in a row of shooting around the Cypress Hills. This is a scene from one of the time-lapses taken from “home,” of prairie flowers in front of a prairie sky.

I also took the opportunity to reshoot the popular “Milky Way over Log Cabin” scene, getting better results I think than the shot I posted from the first night I was here a week ago. This was with the specially-modified camera that picks up the red nebulosity in the Milky Way better. The colours are much nicer.

Finally, this is a 360° panorama of the scene from last night, taken before the Moon set but when it was behind the trees out of sight. Its light still illuminates the sky blue, yet the Milky Way still stands out. The red lights are from two other cameras shooting time-lapses. This is big sky country for sure!

It’s been a wonderful week of shooting on the century-old Reesor Ranch in the Cypress Hills. I highly recommend the location for anyone who wants an authentic western experience in a stunning setting. I’m sure I’ll be back.

July 15, 2013

Road to the Northern Lights

A country road winds off into the dancing Northern Lights.

The sky put on another fine show last night, the fourth in a row with some level of aurora activity. This was the scene Sunday night as a display blossomed for a while, dancing at the end of the back road through the Cypress Hills on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.

I had one camera shooting north and devoted to the Northern Lights, while, as you can see below, I had two other cameras on rigs to shoot time-lapse movies looking south.

This was the scene at the overlook to the Battle Creek valley, with the Moon setting and me getting the time-lapse gear going, to shoot the Milky Way moving over the hills. One camera was on a mount to pan across the landscape following the stars. The other camera was on a motion control dolly to travel down a track over the 3 hours of the shoot. I spent a lot of time in the car listening to BBC Desert Island Discs and The Life Scientific podcasts last night — the thrill of time-lapse shooting!

This is one frame from one of the movies. Streaks of green and red airglow tint the sky around the Milky Way. Amazingly, the scene is lit only by starlight and by the aurora. You could never have done this with film. It’s the sensitivity of digital cameras that makes such scenes possible, though it takes some clever processing (such as Shadow Detail recovery in Raw, Shadows and Highlights, & masked Adjustment Layers) to balance Earth and sky in the final image.

July 14, 2013July 14, 2013

Moonset on a Misty Lake

What a marvelous night for a moonset!

Saturday night was one of the finest nights for nightscape shooting I’ve had in a long time. I started with shots of the waxing Moon setting over Reesor Lake, one of the lakes in Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, on the Alberta side. Water from this lake drains into the Milk River and then into the Missouri, and Gulf of Mexico. It one of the few bodies of water in Alberta that feed the Mississippi watershed, with the Cypress Hills acting as a continental divide.

I set up two cameras, each shooting a twilight-to-night time-lapse sequence showing the Moon setting behind the hills and the stars coming out. I filled up one card with 600 images. Luckily, the other camera still had space left for what was still to come later that night. One sight was the beautiful auroral arc I featured in my previous blog post. I’ll have more tomorrow, of the Milky Way over the lake.

It had rained earlier in the day so the air was humid. Mist covered the lake as night fell. In the scene above, a small fleet of American pelicans also glide by.

Watching the peaceful scene while monitoring the cameras clicking away provided one of those magical moments that makes doing this photography worthwhile, regardless of the results. The mist was swirling, the stars were coming out, I put on some music on the iPhone and on came a Chopin nocturne. Perfect.

June 29, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights

The Northern Lights danced all night, as Earth was buffeted by winds from the Sun.

As soon as I saw the warning notices at Spaceweather.com I was hoping we would be in for a wonderful night of aurora watching. I wasn’t disappointed.

Forewarned, I headed out to the Wintering Hills Wind Farm near my home in southern Alberta. I thought it would be neat to get shots of the effects of the solar wind from beneath and beside the wind turbines of the farm. The shot above is from a time-lapse movie taken with a fish-eye lens that will look great when projected in a full-dome digital planetarium.

I shot with three cameras, with two aimed east to where the brightest part of the auroral arc usually sits. It was also exactly where the Moon would rise after midnight. This shot, above, captures the scene right at moonrise, which was also right when the aurora kicked into high gear as a sub-storm of solar particles rained down on our upper atmosphere. The ground lit up green with the glow of oxygen in the mesosphere, some 100 kilometres up.

This shot, taken moments later with a longer focal length lens, grabs the waning Moon shining behind the distant wind machines, and beneath the arc of auroral curtains.

In all, I shot 50 gigabytes of raw images, both still images and frames for time-lapse movies. I’ve assembled most of them into a musical collage that honours the night. In the final sequence of the movie, it almost looks like the wind machine is facing into the brunt of the solar wind, as pulses of aurora surge from out of the east toward the turbine towering overhead.

The music is by a new favourite artist of mine, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. His latest album of alt-classical/new age music is called “In a Time Lapse.” How could you not like that?! Buy it on iTunes. It’s stunning.

I hope you got to see the Night of the Northern Lights in person. If not, I trust these images and movies give you a sense of the wonder of what the solar wind can do.

June 28, 2013

Coal Dust Stars

The timeless stars turn above a long-abandoned coal mine near East Coulee, Alberta.

For decades, between 1912 and 1979, homes and trains were fueled by coal from the Atlas Coal Mine, one of many in the river valley near Drumheller, Alberta.

Thousands of mine workers populated the boom towns set in the badlands of the Red Deer River. The mines and most of the people are long gone. The Atlas Coal Mine was the last to close, holding out well into the current age of natural gas for home heating and diesel for the trains.

It’s the only mine with buildings that still exist, now as a tourist attraction with daily tours of the mine, both above and below ground.

I spent the evening there last night, the only visitor, except for the owls and coyotes. I was shooting time-lapse sequences and some stills. The shot above is a composite of twenty 1-minute exposures to create the star trails.

For those who prefer a more realistic scene, the short-exposure image above captures the sky more as the eye saw it, with Arcturus and the stars of the Big Dipper shining above the massive wooden tipple.

The Drumheller area is rich in history and photo ops, both for day and night shooting.

June 27, 2013

Night of the Noctilucent Clouds

It was a beautiful summer evening, with stars wheeling overhead in a moonlit sky and the only clouds far away and interesting.

This was one of those nights we get once or twice a summer when the much-anticipated noctilucent clouds – the clouds of summer – put on a perfect show. In my previous post I featured an image from early in the night, last night, June 26, 2013.

These are images and time-lapse movies from later in the night. The composite image above shows stars trailing over 90 minutes with the brilliant noctilucent clouds on the horizon, and fringed by a rosy glow of red twilight where the southern edge of the cloud display, which sits over the Northwest Territories, is being lit by a setting Sun with red sunlight filtering through our atmosphere as it passes over the North Pole.

This telephoto lens shot above captures a close-up of the rosy-fringed noctilucent clouds, behind a lightning-lit thunderstorm rolling through storm alley in central Alberta. The storms can stay there! We’ve had enough of them for a while!

My time-lapse sequence extends over about 90 minutes and opens with a wide-angle view of the display as it appeared low on the horizon. What follows are two closeup views that really show the intricate wave-like motion of these high-altitude mesospheric clouds, and their changing lighting and colours.

These are beautiful clouds drifting on the edge of space but it takes time-lapse to reveal their fluid-like motion.

June 27, 2013

Thunderstorm and Noctilucent Clouds

Two very different forms of clouds drift along the horizon: a thunderstorm nearby and low, and noctilucent clouds far away and high.

This was the scene last night, as another thunderstorm to the north of me rolled along the horizon drifting away to the east. A bolt of lightning illuminates the storm clouds. The thunderstorm was over central Alberta, and at the bottom of our atmosphere, in the troposphere.

Meanwhile, in the background, a beautiful display of noctilucent clouds crept along the horizon in the other direction, drifting to the west. These clouds were over the Northwest Territories, a thousand or more kilometres away to the north and 80 to 100 kilometres high, at the top of the atmosphere in the mesosphere.

The NLC display lasted all night, or for at least as long as I was able to stay up and shoot.

This is a telephoto lens shot that zooms into the brightest part of the NLC display.

June 26, 2013June 26, 2013

Thunderstorm in the Moonlight

A thunderstorm rolls across the northern horizon with the stars of Cassiopeia and Andromeda rising.

This was a perfect night for storm shooting. The storm was far enough away to not engulf me in rain and wind, but close enough to show detail and reveal its bolts of lightning. A waning gibbous Moon shone in the south lighting up the storm clouds to the north and turning the sky blue.

Meanwhile the stars of Cassiopeia, Perseus and Andromeda were rising behind the storm clouds, a nice contrast of Earth and sky.

I’ve been after a confluence of circumstances like this for a few years. An aurora to the northeast would have been nice as well. But you can’t have everything!

June 22, 2013

The Rising of a “Supermoon”

Here is the much hyped Supermoon of 2013 rising into a twilight sky on the wet Alberta prairies.

A clear night for a change, with no storms about. Though one rolled through earlier today. We don’t need any more rain! Thankfully I am high and dry on the Alberta prairie but many friends to the west are not so lucky and have been flooded out, evacuated or have been camping in their homes with power and heat off. Calgary has largely come to a standstill, with the main pastime being watching the rivers rise and fall.

Tonight, after two days of destruction from horrific floods, at least we in southern Alberta were able to enjoy a clear night and the sight of the wonderful solstice Moon rising. This is the closest Full Moon of 2013 and has received an inordinate amount of PR as the “supermoon.”

It certainly did look fine tonight, though in truth no one could ever tell the difference between this “supermoon” and any normal Full Moon.

But perhaps this one is a little special, reminding us that the sky brings beauty as well as destruction.

June 21, 2013

Summer Solstice Panorama on the Prairie

This is the prairie night sky taken at the moment of summer solstice.

I shot this 360° panorama in the field near my house just before midnight on June 20, 2013, right about the official time of summer solstice. This is the longest night of the year and the brightest. The presence of the gibbous Moon contributes most of the night light, but there to the north at left you can see the glow of twilight and an aurora. At right, the waxing Moon shines in clouds, surrounded by a faint halo from ice crystals in the clouds.

Nights around solstice are always bright and filled with wonderful colours and atmospheric phenomena.

The tranquility of the solstice scene is in contrast with the horrific weather disaster taking place west of me near the mountains, as record floods from torrential rains wash away roads, railway lines, and houses. Roads are closed in and out of the mountains and entire neighbourhoods of Calgary near rivers are being evacuated.

Everyone knows somebody who is affected. For many this is indeed a very long and stressful night. I hope everyone keeps safe.

June 1, 2013June 1, 2013

Time-Lapse Techniques — Creating Star Trails

The stars wheel above the Cretaceous-age sediments of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

One of the most powerful techniques in the nightscape photographer’s arsenal is to stack lots of short-exposure images together to create the equivalent of one long exposure showing the motion of the stars. A creative tool to do this in Photoshop is the “Advanced Stacking Actions” from Steven Christenson who maintains a blog and eStore called Star Circle Academy.

I used one of his Actions to create the feature image above. Unlike more run-of-the-mill stacking procedures, Christenson’s nifty Actions can create star trails that look like comets or streaks fading off into the sky at their tail end. It’s a clever bit of Photoshop work achieved by stacking each successive image at slightly lower opacity.

You can use his Actions to create a single composite still image, as above, or to create a set of “intermediate” frames that can be turned into a time-lapse movie with stars turning across the sky and drawing trails behind them. My movie shows several variations. Click the Expand button on the movie to have it fill the screen and reveal the sub-titles.

In Clip #1 I stacked the original set of 360 images without any trailing, using the original frames that came from the camera, albeit with each frame processed to enhance contrast and colour.

In Clip #2 I stacked the images using the “Comet Trails” Action, one that produces very short comet-like streaks.

In Clip #3 I used the “Long Streak” Action to produce longer star trails, but the process also creates unusual cloud streaks as well. Rather neat.

In Clip #4 I used the more conventional “Lighten Mode” to create trails that accumulate over the entire sequence and never fade out. The result on this night was pretty wild and excessive, with the twilight and moonlight adding other-worldly colours.

I certainly recommend the Star Circle Academy Photoshop Actions. While there is a basic Test Set available for free, the full Advanced set is well worth the $30.

May 29, 2013May 30, 2013

Moonlight on the Hoodoos

The stars shine in a bright moonlit sky over the Alberta Badlands.

My feature image above is one of several still frames I took at the end of 4-hour photo shoot last Sunday at Dinosaur Provincial Park. The nearly Full Moon provides the illumination on an eroded landscape originally cut by water from retreating ice age glaciers.

But the volcanic ash layers hold treasures much older, from 70 million years ago. This area contains the world’s richest collection of late Cretaceous fossils of dinosaurs and other flora and fauna from near the end of the dinosaurs’ reign.

The movie below is a 300-frame time lapse of the stars turning behind the hoodoos. It’s a dolly shot, using the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero rail and controller.

The system works very well, but such shots demand a site with a suitable immediate foreground, as well as a good view to the distant sky. It is the parallax motion between foreground and background that makes a dolly move interesting.

I planned this shot to begin at twilight and continue as the sky was darkening, then into the rest of the night with the Moon rising and lighting up the landscape. The moving clouds were perfectly timed and placed!

May 28, 2013

Moonrise on the Badlands

It was a marvellous night for a moonrise. A beautiful night in the badlands

Last Sunday I headed east to Dinosaur Provincial Park, to catch the planet conjunction early in the evening, and then shoot time-lapse sequences of eroded hoodoos lighting up as the nearly Full Moon rose in the east.

The night could not have been better for moonlight photography. The clouds fanned out perfectly from the cameras’ focal points to the north, and in the time-lapse movies (to come!) they add dramatic motion in front of the rotating northern stars.

The feature image above is one of 300 from a motion-controlled dolly shot. The frame below is one of 380 from a static camera time-lapse.

I shot both from a favourite spot at the eastern end of the Badlands Loop drive. As I arrived at sunset, the last of the day-use folks were leaving and I had the place to myself. There was no wind, no humidity, few bugs, mild temperatures and the solace of absolute quiet broken only by some passing geese and the occasional chorus of coyotes.

Even if the images had not turned out it would have been worth the trip.

May 26, 2013May 26, 2013

Aurora at the Observatory

A low aurora appears in the city skyglow and bright moonlight at the local observatory.

After several days of rain, skies cleared beautifully for a Saturday night star party for the public at the local university observatory, the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory, southwest of Calgary.

The evening was capped off by the appearance, as expected, of an auroral arc to the north. Despite the light from the nearly Full Moon and urban sky glow to the north, the aurora managed to compete and put on a show for a few minutes before fading.

About 100 people attended the evening, and were treated to views of Saturn, shining in the south near Spica. Unfortunately, clouds to the west over the mountains never cleared away enough to allow us views, and me photos, of the triple-planet conjunction of Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. Still, a good time was had by all.

May 22, 2013

Time-Lapse Techniques — A Dolly Shot

Time-lapse shooting has become immensely popular of late, but there’s nothing like a dolly shot to add interest to a scene .

Among the more advanced techniques for shooting time-lapse movies is to place the camera on a motorized track for a cinematic “dolly” shot.

These are easy to do in the daytime as the camera simply needs to slide down a rail at a constant rate. But at night, time-lapse dolly shots become more complex. Exposures are often 15 to 60 seconds even in bright moonlight, as here. During each exposure the camera shouldn’t move. The slide down the track should happen only in the brief time between exposures, typically 2 to 5 seconds.

Accomplishing this “shoot-move-shoot” routine requires a specialized bit of kit. In my case, I use the Stage Zero dolly and MX2 controller from Dynamic Perception.

It works great, and sends the camera down the 6-foot rail at a speed you determine. The controller also operates the camera shutter, ensuring sync between the exposures and dolly motion. You can see the setup in operation below, in a 2-part movie. The first scene shows the dolly and camera in operation over the 2-hour shoot, while the second clip shows the time-lapse sequence the dolly-mounted camera took.

This was one of the easiest time-lapse sequences I’ve shot, as I had to travel no more than 100 feet from my house to do it.

I was after a couple of sequences just to use for demo purposes, and didn’t want to tackle a long shoot far from home on a weeknight.

The bright moonlight on May 20 also meant exposures could be short, so that collecting the 300 frames I typically shoot for a time-lapse could be accomplished in well under 2 hours. Getting to bed before 1 am is a rare treat on a time-lapse night!

May 19, 2013May 19, 2013

Old Barn By Aurora Light

As the Northern Lights dance they light up an old barn on a moonlit night.

The still frame above is from the movie down below, a 3-hour-long time-lapse taken on May 17, the night of the big aurora display. I shot this with a camera riding along on a motorized dolly track, to provide the panning motion to the scene.

You can see the rig in this image just below, which I took with another camera framing the entire scene.

Aurora over Old Barn #1 (May 17-18, 2013)

Using the second camera, I was intending to take shots showing a motion-control time-lapse sequence being taken, for illustration in talks and publications.

The aurora quickly forced me to change plans with camera #2. But I let the main motion-control camera continue down its track for the rest of the night, resulting in the movie below. At one point in the movie I briefly appear at right, as I moved the second camera to the south side of the barn to look north to the main area of the display.

In the movie, the stars of Virgo and the planet Saturn rise into a sky lit blue by moonlight early in the evening. As the Moon sets, the shadows rise and engulf the barn.

While catching stars rising behind the rustic old building was the original intention of the shot, the Northern Lights added a bonus. Not only do they dance in the sky behind the barn, but the north face of the old grey barn, in shadow from the moonlight, lights up green from the glow of aurora shining in the north.

Very nice. It certainly made for a colourful scene under the skies of southern Alberta.

May 18, 2013May 18, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights – #3

The memorable night of Northern Lights ended with a final outburst sending blue curtains into the dawn twilight.

This is a frame from May 17-18, taken near the end of my time-lapse sequence, when the aurora kicked up again in intensity and shot towering blue curtains into the northern sky. The pink glow of dawn tinges the northeastern sky, bookending the sequence of 1200 frames and 27 gigabytes of images. Good thing I had a large capacity memory card!

Each shot was 11 seconds at ISO 1600 to try to freeze the moving curtains while still maintaining a good level of exposure.

Here, lights from a passing car at 3 a.m. illuminated the old barn.

As a postscript, I also note that this was my 300th blog post since beginning The Amazing Sky in February 2011. I hope you’ve enjoyed the views of the sky I’ve been able to publish over the last two years.

May 18, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights – #2

You know you are in for a good night when the aurora appears even before the sky gets dark.

I shot this in the evening twilight, as the curtains of Northern Lights began their dance in the dusk. Light from the quarter Moon also illuminates the scene. It was a mad rush to get the camera set and aimed to begin shooting. I was also looking after another camera that was shooting a dolly-shot time-lapse of the barn.

For this image I used the Canon 60Da and Canon 10-22mm lens at the widest setting. Even that was not enough to take in the whole of the display that was covering the sky.

May 18, 2013May 18, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights – #1

What a night this was, with a display of Northern Lights dancing across the sky as soon as it got dark. They danced all night.

I set up May 17 at my neighbourhood rustic farmstead for a night of time-lapse shooting of the old barn in the moonlight, but knowing an aurora was likely. My iPad app beeped and alerted me to that possibility only an hour or so before sunset, letting me know a storm was underway. And sure enough, as soon as it got dark, there were the curtains of green dancing all over the blue twilight sky. This frame is from 1200 I shot in a dusk to dawn time-lapse movie. It is from early in evening, with a pink glow of twilight still fringing the northwest horizon.

What marked this display was the blue and purple curtains, with those colours only really apparent in the camera images. I think those tints come from sunlight hitting the auroral curtains high in the atmosphere where the Sun is still shining. At this time of year the high atmosphere never gets dark and is always lit by sunlight streaming over the pole.

More images to come!

April 26, 2013

Piercing the Night

All things must pass. A bit of billion-year-old comet dust disintegrates above a decaying pioneer farm.

This was a lucky shot to be sure. Last night I returned to my favourite farmstead site to shoot a time-lapse sequence of the stars turning over the moonlit rustic buildings. I started shooting some test frames to get the settings right — the camera was on a motorized dolly to move it along a track for the next three hours, so you want to make sure you have all the settings right. I opened the shutter to start a test series, and whoosh! A bright meteor appeared. Right on time and in frame. That doesn’t happen very often!

However, shooting hundreds of shots for a time-lapse sequence, now a common practice among astrophotographers, does boost your chances of picking up a bright meteor on one of the frames. But having it appear nicely framed is often too much to ask. I was lucky. But … I was out with a camera aimed at the sky, and for getting good shots that’s the first requirement!

April 23, 2013

Returning to the Earth

The works of man crumble and return to the Earth under the timeless turning of the stars.

OK, a bit of purply prose I suppose, but I think the photo turned out rather neat. This is a favourite spot of mine, at a decaying old farmyard down the road from where I live.

It’s one of many such homesteads in the area, built by the CPR railway on land they were granted as part of their enticement to build “the National Dream” rail line across Canada in the 1880s. The CPR then built houses for the pioneer settlers who came by rail to be dropped off across the Prairies, often with little more in hand than a shovel and a sack of potatoes to get them going. Eventually, the railway would make money shipping the pioneers’ wheat and cattle out.

This old homestead was once part of a community in the area called Ouletteville, a town I assume settled by French Canadians or immigrants from France, but long since gone except for its cemetery up the road.

Now, as the house and farm buildings crumble back to dust, they make great subjects for a little low-effort nightscape shooting, especially when trying out new techniques and gear. I don’t have to invest a lot of time travelling, yet the place is photogenic enough to yield some nice shots.

This night I was testing some new panorama shooting techniques, using a fish-eye lens to shoot an all-encompassing 360° view. But this shot was one of several I took at the end of the night, using a more conventional 24mm lens. It’s a stack of 4 exposures: one short 50-second shot at ISO 800 for the initial stars, and then three 10-minute shots at a ISO 100 for the long star trails.

I shot this Monday evening, April 22, on the first decent night in nearly three weeks in what has been an awful spring. At least most of the snow has gone. The waxing gibbous Moon provided the off-camera illumination.

March 23, 2013

PANSTARRS in the Moonlight

Pity this comet is so low and in twilight. Tonight, it suffered the additional indignity of moonlight.

This was Comet PANSTARRS from my front yard tonight, March 23, in a view looking above the trees to the comet setting into the northwest in the bright moonlit sky.

It took binoculars to pick it out visually, and a telephoto lens to frame it photographically with enough scale to show some of the subtle tail structure, in what seems like a broad fan-shaped dusty tail.

We can only hope that next week when the Moon is out of the way, and the comet is a little higher, it will show off more of its developing tail in a darker sky.

As it is, to bring out the comet and background stars I overexposed the frames for this stack of four images, then turned down the brightness and cranked up the contrast in processing. It made for a decent enough portrait of Comet PANSTARRS amid the blue sky and faint stars of Andromeda, the constellation it is travelling through for the next two weeks.

March 17, 2013

Comet PANSTARRS Over the VLA

Comet PANSTARRS hovers in the twilight above the many moonlit dishes of the VLA radio telescope.

I shot this earlier this evening, on Sunday, March 17, on an evening trek out to the VLA (Very Large Array) near Socorro, New Mexico. Light from the nearly quarter Moon high in the sky illuminates the landscape and rims the 27 dishes of the VLA, the radio telescope that has starred in many movies over the years. The comet appears in deep twilight, here with the colours accentuated. Fortunately, the array was arranged in its most compact formation – at times the dishes can be spread out over many miles.

For this shot I took two exposures moments apart: one tracked for 25 seconds for the sky and comet to ensure pinpoint stars, and one untracked for 50 seconds for the ground, to ensure sharp ground detail. I combined them in Photoshop. I used the iPad app Photographer’s Ephemeris to seek out the location, on Highway 52, the public highway leading to the entrance road for the VLA. Lights from cars on the main Highway 60 across the high Plains of San Agustin streak at right.

The comet is becoming more photogenic as it climbs higher, despite the waxing Moon. A classic curving dust tail is now obvious in photos, though here I had the advantage of a very clear sky at a high altitude desert site. Viewing condition don’t get any better than this. Still, this comet will bear watching and shooting over the next month, no matter where you are in the northern hemisphere.

February 15, 2013

Flying Through a Moonlit Winter Night

Tonight the Space Station flew out of the west and overhead as it faded into the shadow of the Earth.

Because tonight the ISS was coming up high into the north, almost directly overhead, I used a fish-eye lens to shoot the entire sky, and took three exposures, each 90 seconds with the camera tracking the stars.

The bright Moon is at right, but despite its light the Milky Way still shows up. The Space Station faded into sunset just as it crossed the Milky Way.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is on board, about to take command at the next crew change. He’s been tweeting lots of comments and photos from space. Check him out at @Cmdr_Hadfield.

January 27, 2013February 9, 2013

Winter Sky in Moonlight

Earlier this week I shot a similar scene with the Moon in the photo, when it was near Jupiter. This is the same sky but 5 days later, on January 26, with the Moon now out of the picture, but serving to light up the landscape.

This is the old house on my property that serves as an occasional foreground for test nightscapes. In this case, I was testing my veteran Canon 5D MkII camera against a new Canon 6D. This shot with the 5D MkII had the best arrangement of clouds and stars and works as a decent enough shot on its own.

You can see Orion dodging the clouds, with Sirius at left, and Aldebaran, Jupiter and the Pleiades at upper right.

So what of the tests? Initial impressions are that as far as noise is concerned (always the bane of astrophotographers) the new full-frame Canon 6D improves upon the 5-year old Canon 5D MkII by a factor of two. Noise looks to be about one f-stop better in the 6D, no doubt due to its new Digic V on-board processor.

What this means is:

• Images taken with the 6D at ISO 6400 have a similar level of noise as do images taken at ISO 3200 with the 5D MkII. ISO 3200 images with the 6D look like ISO 1600 images with the 5D MkII, and so on.

• So, if you were happy with shooting at ISO 1600 with the 5D MkII before, you could now shoot at ISO 3200 with the new 6D and get similar results, but with the added benefit of being able to cut your exposure times in half, always a nice thing to do.

• Or conversely, you could continue to shoot with the Canon 6D at ISO 1600 for the same exposure times as before but get shots with much less noise in them. Always a good thing, too!

It’s great to see camera state-of-the-art advancing.

January 21, 2013February 9, 2013

Moon and Jupiter Amid the Winter Stars

The Moon lights up a sparkling snowscape on the night it was close to Jupiter, as Orion and the winter stars rise.

The Moon is the bright and overexposed glow at upper right. Look carefully and you can just make out Jupiter above the Moon, almost lost in its glare. Below shines Orion, with Sirius the Dog Star just coming up above the distant trees. The Pleiades, at top above the Moon, complete this winter sky scene from Monday, January 21, 2013.

I’m glad I didn’t have to go far to shoot it, just 20 feet out the front door. Standing there for just 15 minutes was a chore, with a wicked east wind blowing in -18° C temperatures. This was a night that would normally fall below my threshold of tolerance for winter observing. But with the Moon so close to Jupiter it was worth a little pain for the gain of a neat winter sky portrait.

The image is a composite of a long and short exposure, in order to capture Jupiter so close to the Moon which, in a single long exposure, would have overexposed so much its light would have swamped Jupiter.

November 30, 2012November 30, 2012

Sailing Toward Orion

Not so long ago sailors used the Moon, Jupiter and the stars to chart their course on Earth. All are in this moonlit seascape.

I took this shot on November 27, as we set sail toward Hook Passage in the Whitsunday Islands, Queensland, Australia. The ship is the Solway Lass, a 110-year-old sailing ship that is now the oldest commercial ship plying the waters around Australia. It has been modernized and refitted, and at night runs with engines, not sails. And today, of course, GPS keeps the skipper informed of where the ship is. But before GPS and radio navigation, sailors used the sky to determine where on Earth they were.

Sextant sightings of the Sun and stars could give them their latitude and longitude. One star often used was Canopus, visible at far right in this image. Canopus has long been associated with the sea. It is the brightest star in Carina the Keel, once part of the sprawling constellation Argo Navis, the ship in the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts. Today, Canopus is still sighted by robot spacecraft bound for the planets to help them determine their position in the solar system.

Sirius and the stars of Orion (lying on his side here at a latitude of 20° South) appear through the rigging. At upper left is the bright glow of the nearly Full Moon, near the star Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster.

Before the acceptance in the late 1700s of the chronometer as an accurate time-keeping device, the position of the Moon near bright stars served as an astronomical clock in the sky to provide sailors with local time. Another source of time (more for land-based navigators) was the changing positions of the moons of Jupiter — Jupiter is the bright star-like object at left.

I just finished a superb 6 days of sailing around the Whitsundays and will have 2 or 3 more sea-bound posts from this wonderful area of the world.

October 5, 2012May 28, 2013

Moonrise on the Badlands

The Moon rises over a lunar-like landscape on Earth.

Well not quite. The badlands of Dinosaur Park, Alberta may look desolate but they were created by forces the Moon has never seen, namely water erosion. And they are “bad” only because we can’t farm them. But to the deer wandering across the top of the hill – and perhaps gazing at the Moon, too – the badlands are a fine place to live.

I shot this image as part of 600-frame time-lapse movie of moonrise, on September 30, the night that produced images for my last few posts. It was a very good night indeed.

October 2, 2012October 2, 2012

Big Dipper Over the Badlands

The Big Dipper swings low over the Badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, with an aurora added for good measure.

This another shot from my very productive night last Sunday out at Dinosaur Park, 100 km east of me. Here the curtains of aurora that made the news that evening shimmer below the iconic seven stars of the Big Dipper, now low in the northern sky on autumn evenings.

Light from the Full Moon provides the illumination. People wonder how we astrophotographers can take pictures of the stars in the daytime. We don’t. We take them at night, letting the Moon light the scene. Its light is just reflected sunlight, so a long enough exposure (and in this case it was only 8 seconds) records the landscape looking as if it were daytime, complete with blue sky, but with stars – and this night an aurora – in the sky.

October 2, 2012

Aurora Highway

Traffic seems to drive off into the Northern Lights, on a highway to heaven.

On the way home Sunday night the aurora exploded again in a burst of brilliance. I pulled over by the side of the road and grabbed some shots. I’m looking north here, with the Big Dipper also in the frame. For this shot I layered in two exposures for the ground to get a more complete sweep of the taillights. But the sky is from a single frame.

This was the widely-seen aurora of September 30, 2012. This scene of mad motion down the highway contrasts with the quiet solitude of the badlands landscape of the previous post.

October 1, 2012October 1, 2012

Northern Lights Dancing Over the Badlands

It was a marvellous night – a triple act: with a fabulous sunset, a beautiful moonrise, then as the sky got dark the aurora came out and danced.

Sunday night I headed out to Dinosaur Provincial Park near Brooks, Alberta, site of the world’s best late-Cretaceous fossil finds, and a striking landscape of eroded badlands. I was just finishing taking frames for a sunset-to-twilight time-lapse movie when the aurora kicked up in activity, quite bright at first, despite the light from the nearly Full Moon, which is illuminating the landscape. I swung the camera around, loaded in a new memory card and begun shooting another time-lapse sequence of the dancing northern lights in the moonlight.

While the display faded to the eye over the next hour, the camera still nicely picked up the subtle colours, like the magenta hues. I shot 330 frames, each 8 seconds long at ISO 800 and f/2.8 with a 16-35mm lens and Canon 5D MkII camera.They’ll make a great movie sequence.

It was a 40-gigabyte night, as the second camera was shooting the moonrise over the badlands. But then I pressed it into service as well shooting the aurora. It was a great night to be at a location as wonderful as Dinosaur Park.

September 29, 2012

Harvesting the Wind

The Harvest Moon rises behind a new crop, a wind turbine harvesting the wind.

I shot this Friday evening, September 28, technically the day before Full Moon and the annual Harvest Moon. The location is amid the Wintering Hills Wind Farm northeast of me and south of Drumheller, Alberta.

This is one frame of 450 in a time-lapse sequence going from sunset into twilight with the Moon rising through the clouds. The changing colours were wonderful.

September 14, 2012September 14, 2012

Star Trail Reflections

The stars of the southern sky arc over the peaks of the Lake Louise Range in this half-hour’s worth of exposures.

For this shot I took 35 frames from a 200-frame time-lapse movie and stacked them to create star trails moving over about 25 minutes time when the sky was dark and moonless. I also layered in the moonlit landscape from a frame taken at the very end of the time-lapse sequence when the Moon has risen and was lighting the mountains and trees. So this scene is a bit of a Photoshop fake, but only so far as to merge exposures taken a couple of hours apart from the same fixed camera to combine the sky and stars from when the Moon was not in the sky with the ground from when it was, so the ground isn’t too dark and featureless.

What most people find surprising about star trail shots is the range of colours displayed. Some of the magenta trails come from a little chromatic aberration in the lens. But nevertheless, stars do exhibit lots of colours, but usually only in time exposures like this. As a bonus one frame captures either a meteor or an Iridium satellite flare at right above Mount Victoria.

I took the images for this scene on Friday, September 7, on a shoot at Herbert Lake in Banff.

September 4, 2012

The Sky on Fire with Northern Lights

At last … a good display of northern lights towering up the sky.

The evening of Tuesday, September 4 provided the best aurora display I’ve seen in recent years. It was fairly bright and reached up to the zenith and beyond into the south. Colours were green, with just a hint of high-altitude red visible to the naked eye. The camera picks up the colours of an aurora better than the eye can see.

I shot this aurora from my rural backyard. The display came up quite quickly over 10 to 15 minutes starting about 11 p.m., and, as usual, started as an arc across the northeast then rose higher to cover all the northern sky up to the zenith, as shown in this horizon-to-zenith image. The light from the waning gibbous Moon just off camera to the right illuminated the foreground. The show was short-lived. By 12:30 a.m. the auroral curtains had faded into obscurity.

– Alan, September 4, 2012

September 3, 2012

The Windblown Stars

Here’s the “long” version of an image I posted a few days ago. This combines 430 exposures to make one long star trail image.

A bright meteor appeared in one of the hundreds of 5-second-long exposures and registers in the composite, streaking diagonally across the star trails. The stars circle around Polaris at top. The horizontal streaks are clouds blowing from left to right across the sky during the night. The blades of the windmill in the Wintering Hills wind farm are blurring by the long exposures.

It’s been a productive few nights shooting out at the wind farm, capturing scenes of harvesting the wind!

August 31, 2012August 31, 2012

Meteor and Windmill in the Moonlight

A rare bright meteor pierces the northern sky beside a spinning windmill in the moonlight.

I shot this Thursday night, August 30, as one frame of 300 or so shot for a time lapse sequence. Having a camera taking hundreds of frames at rapid interval, as you do for a time-lapse movie, is the only way to capture the chance and fleeting appearance of a bright meteor like this.

You can see the Big Dipper behind the machine and Polaris, the North Star, directly above the well-placed meteor.

I drove out to the new Wintering Hills Wind Farm now operating northeast of me and found a machine I could get close to. And they are huge! This is a sequence from a dolly shot I took. But the other camera was on a fixed tripod and I’ll stack those images into a long star trail scene, to get the circumpolar stars spinning alongside the windmill. But the machine was turning so fast that even 4 second exposures in bright moonlight blurred the blades more than I would have liked.

August 15, 2012August 15, 2012

Little Schoolhouse Under Prairie Skies

There aren’t many left now. Here on a bare prairie hilltop near where I live stands one of the last of the one-room schoolhouses.

Located near the now-vanished town of Majorville, Alberta is the Liberty School, built in 1909. I tried to look up the history of this particular school but found only references to other similar schools in the area. The stories from teachers who worked in such schools were fascinating. Amy Corbiell, a relative of one of my neighbours, taught at a nearby school in the 1930s. Imagine the scene on the prairies back then:

“Some days when the dust blew I remember it got so dark the pupils couldn’t see to work. I would light our one little coal-oil lamp and read to them until I could safely send them home.”

The lone teacher would live either in the home of one of the students. Or she would be put up in what we would now call a shack – the teacherage – next to the school. She would attend to the students ages 6 to 16, keep the pot-bellied stove going, bring in water from the hand pump outside, perhaps play the piano (if there was one), and organize the big annual Christmas concert. There might be a barn nearby for the kids to shelter their horses. Yes, they really did ride to school each day. It was a hard life by today’s soft standards.

But as Helen Courtney, another teacher from the era, remarked in her reminiscences,

“The 1930s are remembered as the depression years, the years of crop failures, and blizzard-like dust storms. They were also the times when neighbours helped neighbours, people shared what they had, extended kindness and friendship and looked hopefully toward a better future.”

My photo, taken under bright moonlight on August 4, shows the Big Dipper over the little schoolhouse, and a summer thunderstorm rolling across the far horizon.

August 13, 2012August 13, 2012

Perseid Meteors and Planets over a Mountain Lake

It was quite a night, and a wonderful dawn. This was the scene at the end of a night of falling stars.

A trio of Perseid meteors zips down at left, while at right a trio of solar system worlds rises into the pre-dawn sky. The overexposed waning Moon is flanked by Jupiter above and Venus below. Jupiter shines near the Hyades star cluster and below the Pleiades cluster.

I took this shot (it is actually a composite of three shots, each with its own meteor) on the morning of Sunday, August 12 on the peak night of the annual Perseid meteor shower, widely publicized this year due to the lack of a Moon for most of the night, and the convenience of falling on a weekend. The scene is looking east over Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park, Alberta, one of the few places in this part of the Rockies you can look east to a reasonably unobstructed sky.

Notice the glitter path on the water from not only the Moon but also Venus.

August 4, 2012August 4, 2012

Driving to Andromeda

Are we there yet? It would take a long time to get to the end of this road.

A road in Banff appears as if it is heading toward the autumn constellations rising over the peaks of the Fairholme range in the Canadian Rockies. The stars of Andromeda (centre), Pegasus (right), Perseus (left), and Cassiopeia (above left) make up the panorama of mythological heroes populating the northern autumn sky. In the sky above the road the small smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy is visible, shining from 2.5 million light years away. A faint aurora at left adds to the moonlit scene.

I shot this Sunday, July 29, moments after taking the image in the previous blog, which was looking the other way, north toward Cascade Mountain, from the meadows north of Banff. This was a very photogenic spot.

August 3, 2012August 3, 2012

Stars over Cascade Mountain, Banff

Last Sunday night I was in Banff for a concert at the Banff Centre but ended the night with a round of nightscape shooting near the town.

I shot this from the Lake Minnewanka scenic loop road just north of the townsite. It captures the Big Dipper and Arcturus swinging down over Cascade Mountain, the iconic peak that stands as the background for so many photos of Banff. Moonlight provided ideal side-lighting.

I hope to head back to this area for next weekend’s Perseid meteor shower. The weather prospects look good!

Night One — Peyto Lake, Banff National Park

Night Two — Pyramid Lake, Jasper National Park

Night Three — Athabasca River Viewpoint, Jasper National Park

Night Four — Edith Lake, Jasper National Park

Night Five — Lake Louise, Banff National Park

Nightscape Gear

Behind-the-Scenes Processing

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Tutorial #1 – The Northern Lights

Tutorial #2 – Moonlit Nightscapes

Tutorial #3 – Star Trails

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