Tag: nightscape

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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

 

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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!

– Alan, September 3, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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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.

— Alan, August 31, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Camping Under the Planets


Here’s a final scene from the recent big star party, of campers under Mars and Saturn, two planets setting into the twilight.

Saturn is just in the clouds, Mars is below, and just above the treetops is Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. The three objects were in close conjunction through mid-August but set early in the evening.

I shot this at the recent Saskatchewan Summer Star Party in Cypress Hills. Most of my blogs of the last 10 days have featured shots from the star party or of the star party. It was a super weekend for stargazing.

– Alan, August 27, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Star Gazing


Happiness is a big telescope under a dark sky.

This is Regina astronomer Vance Petriew, gazing skyward at the Milky Way in Cassiopeia. Vance is the discoverer of Comet 185/P, aka Comet Petriew. This year, his comet returned to the August sky as a faint glow in Gemini, close to where it was when Vance found it exactly 11 years to the day before this image was taken, and at the very same spot in the campsite at Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park in Saskatchewan.

We all revelled in the Saskatchewan comet’s return, staying up till 4 am to see it through Vance’s 20-inch telescope, a reflector made by the small company called Obsession. (When you have an Obsession, you are a serious observer!) Enjoying the view early that morning before dawn were  Vance’s three daughters, only one of whom was around 11 years ago and then as a baby. But this year even the four-year-old was able to see Dad’s comet up close.

At the afternoon talks Vance recounted the story of how the comet’s discovery changed his life, and led to immense changes at the Park. As a result of the media and political attention the comet brought, the Park has become a Dark Sky Preserve, one of the first in Canada, leading a nationwide movement, while astronomy programming is now an integral part of the Park’s interpretive programs, as it is becoming at other provincial and national parks. There is now a permanent public observatory and lecture hall nearby in Cypress Hills, just a short walk away from where the comet was found.

Comets can have quite an impact!

— Alan, August 24, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Horizon to Horizon Milky Way


The view doesn’t get any wider than this. This fish-eye image takes in the entire night sky and summer Milky Way.

I shot this last weekend at the Saskatchewan Summer Star Party in Cypress Hills. Red lights of observers streak along the horizon around the perimeter of the circular image. At centre is the zenith, the point in the sky straight overhead.

The sky was very dark, but the sky close to the horizon is tinted with the faint glows of aurora and airglow.

The Milky Way is the main feature of the summer sky, here stretching from Sagittarius in the south at bottom to Perseus at top in the north. Wide shots like this really put the giant lanes of dust into proper context; you can see their full structure and faint tendrils extending well off the Milky Way band.

For these fish-eye shots (suitable for projection in a planetarium) I used a Sigma 8mm fish-eye lens and a full-frame Canon 5D MkII camera. This is a stack of five 5-minute exposures, all tracked. The landscape is from just one of the images, to minimize blurring of the ground.

— Alan, August 23, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Lost in the Milky Way


Just lie back and lose yourself in the Milky Way.

That’s what one person is doing here, under the starry skies of Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan. In summertime the Milky Way is the main attraction at night. Here, it rises from the south, a region containing the centre of our Galaxy in Sagittarius, to climb up overhead through the star clouds of Scutum and Aquila, then into Cygnus in our local spiral arm, and on into Cassiopeia at the top of the frame in the north.

As in most deep sky photos, I’ve boosted the contrast and colour to make a dramatic image. To the eye the Milky Way appears in subtle shades of grey painted with the dark brushstrokes of dust lanes winding through the bright clouds of stars. But your eye does see much of this structure.

I like these types of ultra-wide images. They capture the mind’s eye impression of what the Milky Way looks like across the vault of heaven.

This is a stack of four 5-minute exposures, all tracked on a small equatorial mount, the Kenko SkyMemo, and all taken with the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800 and Canon’s ultra-wide 15mm lens at f/4, as you can see from the photo data at left. I retained the ground from just one image, to minimize the blurring from the slowly moving camera tracking the stars. I masked out the ground in the other 3 images. They help smooth out noise in the sky.

— Alan, August 21, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Star Party Panorama


This image depicts a 360° panorama of the field and sky at the Saskatchewan Summer Star Party.

This was my first time shooting a nighttime panorama but it was easy. Just 12 exposures taken at 30° intervals panning around on a levelled tripod, in classic planetarium panorama style. Each exposure was 30 seconds at f/2 and ISO 3200 with the Canon 5D MkII and 24mm lens. It helps to have a high-quality fast lens.

North is at centre, south on either end.

The sky contains some interesting and subtle features that show up well in a wide-angle panorama like this:

– The bright summer Milky Way is setting at left in the southwest while the fainter winter half of the Milky Way is rising opposite, at right in the northeast.

– Jupiter and the Pleiades rise at right just off the Milky Way

– A meteor streaks over the trees at centre

– At centre, to the north, glows a faint yellow and magenta aurora

– The larger green glow left of centre is, I suspect, airglow rather than aurora. It has a striated structure, particularly at right of centre above the trees where it appears as subtle green and red bands arching across the northeast.

The sky this night was dark but did have a brighter than usual background, likely due to the presence of this faint airglow that the camera picks up better than the eye.

Even so, I can see another faint glow:

– A whitish band coming up from the northeast passing through Jupiter and below the Pleaides. That’s the Zodiacal Band, an extension of the brighter Zodiacal Light and caused by sunlight reflecting off cometary dust in the ecliptic plane.

The location of the panorama and star party was the Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park in southwest Saskatchewan, one of the darkest places in southern Canada.

— Alan, August 20, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Party Under the Stars


For astronomers this is party central – under the starclouds of the summer Milky Way.

Over the past weekend, August 16-18, I attended the annual Saskatchewan Summer Star Party, held in the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan. Skies could not have been better.

This was the scene Friday night, with telescopes under the Milky Way. About 350 people attended, and nearly as many telescopes it seemed! This is one small section of the observing and camping field.

Cypress Hill Park has been declared a Dark Sky Preserve, in recognition of the Park’s role in preserving and presenting the dark skies that are as much a part of our natural world as are the flora and fauna of the Earth. Every year astronomers converge on the Hills to revel in their pristine skies … and party – quietly! – under the Milky Way. Wandering the field you could overhear “Hey, look at this!”, “Wow!”, “O-o-o-h!”, “I found the __ nebula!” and many more exclamations of joy and wonderment.

My image is a composite of a single untracked exposure for the sharp foreground and a stack of 5 tracked exposures for the sky and Milky Way. All were 2 minute exposures, taken moments apart. Boosting the contrast makes the Milky Way stand out with far more detail and colour than the eye can see. Nevertheless, the Milky Way was a grand sight and the main attraction over the Cypress Hills this past weekend.

– Alan, August 19, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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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.

— Alan, August 15, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Shooting Through the Stars


Two bright meteors streak across the circling stars on the peak night of the Perseid meteor shower.

Of course, as is typical of bright meteors, the really bright one, the night’s best, I missed by that much! It shot off camera toward the west. But I got most of it. When shooting meteor showers you just aim and shoot and hope for the best. With luck some meteors will decide to shoot through the camera field when the shutter is actually open — they often appear just after the shutter closes.

This is a stack of nine 1-minute exposures in rapid succession, with two frames managing to pick up a bright meteor each. Over the nine minutes of exposure time the stars trailed as they rose in the east and circled Polaris at top left.

For this sequence I set up in Banff National Park at the picnic area at the Upper Bankhead parking lot at the base of Cascade Mountain, looking east toward the constellation of Perseus and the radiant point of the meteors — Perseids all appear to shoot out of Perseus, the bright collection of stars at centre.

— Alan, August 13, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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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.

— Alan, August 13, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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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.

— Alan, August 4, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Moon over Banff


This was the scene Sunday evening, July 29 with the gibbous Moon shining over Banff, Alberta.

I shot this from the viewpoint on Mt. Norquay overlooking the town of Banff, a favourite evening spot for tourists. Two just happened to wander into the scene and point at the Moon right on cue.

The mountain at left is Mt. Rundle; at right is Sulphur Mountain with its Gondola lift and hot springs, the “spa” attraction that created Banff in the 1880s and inspired the CP Railroad to build its famous Banff Springs Hotel, here in the distance on the far side of the town and still the posh place to stay when in Banff.

— Alan, August 3, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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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!

— Alan, August 3, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Circling Stars over Pyramid Mountain


The previous post showcased one image taken last Saturday night at Patricia Lake. This is a composite of 98 such frames, producing an image of stars circling the sky.

This is the motion of the northern sky over 75 minutes, as the Big Dipper and other circumpolar stars arc around the celestial pole, just off camera here. A few faint meteors streak at left. And the makings of an aurora appears at right.

Each exposure was 45 seconds long. I used a Photoshop Action to automatically select each frame in turn and stack it on top of the previous image, then change the blend mode to Lighten and flatten the layers. The end result of the computer crunching away is an image that recreates what we used to achieve with film, by stopping down the lens and exposing a slow ISO film for an hour or more onto one frame.

I last shot this same scene a decade ago with just that technique and Fuji Velvia film, a favourite of mine back then for star trails. But these days shooting multiple short exposures digitally provides the advantage of also netting a folder-full of images suitable for a time-lapse movie, something we could never do with film cameras, unless they were modified movie cameras. I like DSLRs better.

— Alan, August 1, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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The Big Dipper Over Pyramid Mountain


 

Pyramid Mountain is Jasper’s iconic peak dominating the skyline of the mountain town in Alberta. The mountain and its foreground lakes are ideally placed for nightscapes of the northern sky.

I took this shot Saturday night, July 28, from the shore of Patricia Lake, one of several that dot the benchlands south of Pyramid Mountain. Small lakes like Patricia have the benefit of often being calm and reflective. Here the stars of the Big Dipper and Ursa Major swing over top of Pyramid Mountain, in the blue moonlit sky. A few well-placed clouds add a welcome perspective. This is one frame of 150 or so in a time-lapse sequence, and that will eventually become a star trail composite as well. But this single frame stands well all on its own.

The last time I was here shooting this same scene I was using Ektachrome and Fujichrome film (each had its unique characteristics, though just what I can’t recall!). That was more than a decade ago. This digital shot with the Canon 7D looks far better than what I got back then.

— Alan, July 30, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Lunar Reflections at Lac Beauvert


After a day of cloud and rain, skies cleared to provide a stunning twilight scene of the Moon reflected in the calm waters of Lac Beauvert in Jasper National Park.

This is the view from the dock at the prestigious and posh Jasper Park Lodge, where the rich and famous stay when in Jasper. I was there just to shoot the sky. In the distance is the distinctive snow-covered peak of Mount Edith Cavell, a Jasper landmark. Above it shines the waxing gibbous Moon in the twilight colours.

— Alan, July 30, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Athabasca Falls by Night


Athabasca Falls is one of the most popular and photographed attractions in Jasper National Park – by day. But by night, the falls on the Athabasca River are deserted.

In the distance, the stars rise behind Mount Kerkeslin. In the foreground, the river plunges into a deep gorge. These waters, with headwaters at the Columbia Glacier in the Icefields to the south, eventually make their way north to the Arctic Ocean.

I was at the Falls last Friday night, to shoot them by moonlight and under the stars. But in this case, I provided added foreground illumination from a flashlight.

As I took this and other shots, flashes of lightning from nearby thunderstorms occasionally lit the night. I had a couple of hours of clear skies before clouds moved in for the night, enough time to get frames for a time-lapse movie and some still frames like this one.

— Alan, July 30, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Athabasca Moon


I’ve spent the last couple of night in Jasper National Park, home to the world’s largest Dark Sky Preserve, dedicated to maintaining the darkness of the natural night sky.

This is a scene from Friday night, taken well before darkness, as the waxing Moon shone in the twilight above the Athabasca River and the peaks of the continental divide. For many years in the early 19th century fur traders plied these waters. Now rafters do.

Jasper is far enough north of me that I don’t get there very often. I’ve been spending most of my mountain time in Banff. I realize it’s been a decade or more since I’ve driven all the way up the Icefields Parkway to visit Jasper. But I was happy to be back. It has some great sites for nightscape photography.

I got two clear nights this past weekend, so a few more shots will hit the blog in the next few days.

— Alan, July 29, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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A River of Starlight and Dust


 

Look up on a dark summer night in the northern hemisphere and you see a river of stars flowing across the sky.

This is the Milky Way, a glowing mass of millions of distant stars populating the spiral arms of the Galaxy we live in. Lining the arms are lanes of dark interstellar dust, seen here splitting the Milky Way in two from the bright red North America Nebula at top, down to the core of the Galaxy in Sagittarius on the horizon. The dust is the soot created in stars and blown into space to form a new generation stars and planets.

This ultra-wide-angle scene takes in almost the entire summer Milky Way from the southern horizon to beyond the zenith overhead at top. I shot this a couple of nights ago from my rural backyard on a particularly transparent and dark night. It was heaven on Earth.

— Alan, July 26, 2012 / © @ 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Under the Milky Way


What a marvellous night for the Milky Way. The sky was clear and the night warm and bug free, making for a perfect evening for public stargazing.

People only had to travel 30 minutes out of the city, but what an exotic, wonderful sky they discovered. The Milky Way is the main attraction, familiar by name but little seen by most. But this night, at the Rothney Observatory’s public starnight, hundreds got to see the marvels of the Milky Way and the deep sky for themselves. Astronomers, including yours truly, provided laser-guided tours of the naked eye night sky. A dozen or more telescopes and their owners provided close up views of nebulas and star clusters. After a summer so far of too much rain and cloud, this was a welcome and well-attended chance to see the stars.

— Alan, July 22, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Waiting for the Sky Show


 

It was an ideal summer night for a public star party. Like it was a summer music festival, people set up lawn chairs and laid out blankets to sit and lie back and watch the show — the sky show.

This was the scene at Saturday’s Milky Way Night, July 21,  at the local university’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. Several hundred people attended under ideal clear skies to watch the summer stars appear and revel in the Milky Way away from city lights. Here, people gaze westward after sunset to see the triangular gathering of Saturn, Mars and Spica in the evening twilight. Lots of mobile phones were held skyward as people used their new astronomy apps to identify what they were seeing. These apps are probably the most effective means now for people to get into astronomy. Lots of people were using them this night.

— Alan, July 22, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Star Trail Reflections at Bow Lake, Banff


It’s rare to get such a clear night in the mountains, but last weekend, July 6-7, provided a couple of ideal nights.

This image combines about 180 exposures, each 45 seconds long, stacked to create a single image of long star trails setting into the west behind Bow Glacier in Banff. The result records the sky’s motion over nearly two and a half hours. Running at right angles across the descending stars are vertical streaks from a bright meteor (left) and a satellite (top, centre).

Light from the rising waning Moon provides the illumination.

— Alan, July 16, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Dawn’s Early Lights II


Here’s a wider shot of the Moon-Jupiter-Venus gathering at dawn on July 14.

The clouds parted nicely for a clear view of the sky where it needed to be clear (a rare occurrence!) while adding their colour to the pre-dawn scene. I like cooperative clouds. Let’s see if they behave for tomorrow morning’s closer conjunction.

— Alan, July 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Dawn’s Early Lights


Venus and Jupiter are reprising their mutual meetings of earlier this spring, but now in the pre-dawn summer sky.

This was the scene at 4 a.m. from home on July 14, with the waning crescent Moon, here overexposed, above Jupiter and Venus at dawn. Next to Venus is the star Aldebaran and the stars of the Hyades star cluster in Taurus. Above the Moon is the Pleiades star cluster.

On July 15, the Moon will appear between Venus and Jupiter for one of the best conjunctions of 2012.

— Alan, July 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Circling Star Trails in the Rockies


Let the camera shoot for a few hours and this is what you get: stars circling the sky, turning into concentric paths around the North Star.

For this image I stacked 230 short exposures, each 50 seconds long, taken over about 4 hours time on July 7/8. My previous blog entry is one of those individual frames. But in this composite, the stars become trails rotating about the pole of the sky, near Polaris, the North Star, here over Num-Ti-Jah Lodge at Bow Lake in Banff. Moonlight provides the illumination and turns the sky blue, just as in daytime, only much dimmer. But the long exposures bring out the colours and make the scene look like daylight, because the light of the Moon is daylight, just reflected first off the Moon’s neutral grey face.

The same frames used to make this still frame composite can also be used to make a time-lapse movie of the circumpolar stars turning.

— Alan, July 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Big Dipper over Num-Ti-Jah Lodge


“Around the fire tonight Jim Simpson said that for his money this campsite was the closest one could get to heaven on Earth. And I reckon he’s not far wrong.” — Bill Peyto at Bow Lake, July 11, 1902.

Peyto penned that description 110 years ago to the day. His friend always said he’d build a shack here one day. And he did. This is Num-Ti-Jah Lodge, a classic wood log building, hand-hewn and assembled by Jimmy Simpson and his family in the 1940s. They ran the lodge for many years.

I was there this past weekend, July 6 and 7, shooting nightscape photos under the waning Moon. This view looks due north, with the Big Dipper and Polaris over the lodge. To the right, in the northeast, glows a faint red aurora. To the northwest stands Mount Jimmy Simpson, named for the pioneer who built his dream lodge at his heaven-on-Earth campsite.

Heaven is not without its dangers however. Earlier in the evening a yearling grizzly bear was wandering around the lodge and had to be scared off by a Parks official. I’m glad he did! Meeting a bear in the dark is a hazard of shooting in the mountains I have yet to encounter, and don’t wish to.

— Alan, July 11, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Bow Lake by Moonlight (2012)


What a fabulous night this was — perfectly clear and the gibbous moon lighting up the mountains. It was a wonderland for nightscape photography.

I took this shot late on Friday, July 6 at Bow Lake in Banff, Alberta. The summer stars shine behind Bow Glacier, and the peaks are illuminated by the rising waning Moon. Saturn, setting behind the continental divide, is reflected in the still waters while Arcturus shines high in the sky.

This is one frame of 320 I took through the night for a time-lapse movie, and for stacking into a long star-trail composite. Those are still to come!

Compare this to the scene I took last summer under a dimmer quarter Moon and later in the season.

— Alan, July 8, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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The Wow Sky of Winter


The winter sky contains a lot of bright stars but none so bright as Venus and Jupiter now in the west.

This wide-angle shot takes in the evening sky from the duo of planets in the west (right) to Sirius shining brightly in the south (left), with Orion in between. Above and to the right of Orion sit the two big naked eye star clusters of winter: the scattered Hyades and the compact Pleiades.

This was the picture-perfect scene last Tuesday night when I shot other frames of just the planets over the house in the foothills of the Rockies near Bragg Creek, Alberta. This is the wider scene, bathed in the deep blue of twilight.

— Alan, March 16, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Conjunction over Calgary


For my continuing series of Venus-Jupiter conjunction shots, on Wednesday night I stayed in Calgary and shot the planets over the city skyline.

Here Venus and Jupiter shine in the clear evening twilight over the downtown core of the city, now dominated by the new Bow tower. I  didn’t have to venture far for this shot, as the best vantage point and angle for framing the planets over the city was the top of Tom Campbell Hill, right beside the TELUS Spark science centre where I work.

We’ll see if the clear nights continue. But it’s been a good run all this week. The last few blogs show the results from each night’s shooting since Saturday.

— Alan, March 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Tilting at the Sky (with Venus & Jupiter)


Venus and Jupiter are the planets that just keep on giving! What a photogenic pairing they are proving to be this month.

Here they are behind one of the icons of the prairies, an old water pump windmill, made it would seem by the Flint and Walling Mfg. Co of Kendallville, Indiana, USA, probably in the 1930s or 40s. My area of southern Alberta was once considered too dry for agriculture and it was only irrigation that made the land livable. Individual farm pumps of the dustbowl era were replaced by a mega-project system of canals and reservoirs to water what is effectively a desert. And a windswept one. A blustery Chinook wind was blowing this night.

The pair of planets is at right, tonight in about as close a conjunction as they will get, about 3° apart. The Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in Taurus poke through the clouds at top. The night was quite hazy but the clouds added the yellow colour from Calgary streetlights in the distance. Natural twilight added the blues and purples. Car headlights lit the foreground.

— Alan, March 12, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Bridging Earth and Sky (Off to Venus and Jupiter)


This was the scene Sunday night, March 11, as Venus edged up to Jupiter in the evening twilight.

To capture the nightscape I hunted around for a spot along the Bow River near home and settled for a site on the banks of the river at the point called Blackfoot Crossing, the traditional heart of the Siksika First Nation land. Here, the Bow River runs north-south for a stretch and the highway crosses the river heading west into the evening twilight, as if off into the sky to meet Venus and Jupiter in conjunction.

I waited until a passing car added the streak of tail lights, heading off into the sunset and starry sky. Nightscapes like this are often best taken when the sky is fairly dark but a longer exposure still brings out the remaining colours of twilight, as well as fainter stars, to make an image enhanced from what the eye might have seen.

— Alan, March 11, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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The Marvellous Mid-March Sky


We have a marvellous sky above us these nights, with an array of brilliant beacons in the evening sky.

This wide-angle scene captures the western and southern sky. To the west at right shine Venus and Jupiter. To the south at centre stands Orion. His famous Belt points up to Taurus and the Pleiades star cluster. His Belt points down to the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, the Dog Star in Canis Major. Above, at top left, is the other Dog Star, Procyon, in Canis Major.

The last vestige of twilight tints the sky deep blue. But some of the red nebulas in and around Orion are beginning to show up as the sky darkens on a late winter night.

I shot this Saturday night, March 10, on the last evening of Standard Time. Now, I and all astronomers have to wait up another hour to see and shoot the wonders of the night sky. Astronomers hate Daylight Saving Time.

— Alan, March 11, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Mars Down the Road


Here’s Mars, now at its closest and brightest in two years. Look for it due east in the early evening, as a rising reddish star in Leo.

On March 7, the Full Moon sits next to Mars, making for a fine sight as the pair rise together at sunset.

I took this shot March 4, with the Moon just off the frame at the top. Here, the eastbound county road seems to head off across the Prairies to Mars. It’s got a long way to go. Even at its closest right now, Mars is still 100 million kilometres away.

— Alan, March 6, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Planet Trio in the West


Look west this week (the first week of March) and you’ll see three planets in a line across the evening sky.

Mercury is lowest in the sky, visible here just above the clouds on the western horizon. It’s bright but easy to miss. To find it, draw a line between Venus and Jupiter and extend the line down and to the right. This week Mercury is putting on its best evening appearance for the year for northern latitudes. You won’t see it higher or brighter than this in 2012.

Farther up the sky is Venus and Jupiter. They are standout objects. As they approach each other over the next week more and more people will suddenly pay attention to them and wonder what they are.

This was the view Sunday night, March 4. The next night a change in the weather brought heavy snow and a blizzard across the Prairies. But clear skies have returned, so enjoy the planets!

— Alan, March 6, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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A Panorama of Planets


This was a beautiful night, with the array of five worlds stretched across the sky, a parade of planets and the Moon.

Mercury is now at its greatest angle away from the Sun and easiest to see in the evening sky this week for the year, at least from Canadian latitudes. Even so, it is low in the western twilight.

You can’t miss Venus and Jupiter higher in the west. Watch them close up and trade places in mid-March.

Mars is now at opposition, closest to Earth, and rising at sunset. It shines brightly as a red star in the east, 180° away from Mercury. It will be in our sky for several more months.

Orion shines due south amid the clouds. The arc of clouds rather nicely defines the arc of the ecliptic path across the sky, the path along which we always find the planets.

I took the shots for this panorama on Sunday, March 4. I took five segments, each 13 second exposures with a 16-35mm lens, then combined them in Photoshop CS5 with its Photomerge command.

— Alan, March 4, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Mercury Rising Over Calgary


Mercury is elusive but here it is, showing up as a speck over the skyline of Calgary, as it begins its best evening appearance of the year, rising a little higher into the twilight sky each night for the next few evenings.

To find it, follow the line down from the Moon and then bright Jupiter and Venus at upper left and continue that line to the lower right. Just to the right of the tallest building (the new Bow tower) and just above the rooftops there’s a tiny dot of light. That’s the inner planet Mercury. It’ll get higher in the first week of March but not by much. Mercury is bright. It’s just not very high and is easy to miss.

But with Mercury coming into view, and with Venus and Jupiter so prominent now in the evening, and Mars now bright in the east after sunset – look for a red star – we have a nice array of 4 naked eye planets across the sky at once. Saturn comes up later after midnight now. So you can see 5 naked eye planets in one night.

It’s a great evening sky show now in early March.

– Alan, March 1, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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The Great Sky Show of 2012 Begins


The show has been underway for a while but this past weekend anyone with clear skies couldn’t help but notice some beautiful sights in the evening sky. They herald the start of a wonderful late winter and spring of evening celestial scenes.

Tonight, after a snowy weekend that brought winter back to Alberta, skies cleared enough to reveal the waxing crescent Moon next to Jupiter, with both above brilliant Venus. Over the next two weeks watch as Venus and Jupiter converge for a mutual conjunction March 12 to 13. Then on March 25 we’ll see the Moon next to Jupiter and the near Venus the following night, just a month from now.

For the next two weeks we also have Mercury at its best low in the western evening sky and Mars rising in the east at sunset as it reaches its closest point to Earth in two years. It’s a great planetary spring.

Keep looking up!

— Alan, February 26, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Orion Over Our Fence of Mountains


For us in the northern hemisphere, Orion is the very symbol of a winter night, as he stands over snowy landscapes. I took this photo from Lake Louise, in the Rocky Mountains on a chill February night.

Robert Frost, the American poet, describes the inspiring scene of Orion climbing into a winter sky:

“You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me

Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something

I should have done by daylight, and indeed,

After the ground is frozen, I should have done

Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful

Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney

To make fun of my way of doing things,

Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.”

_____________________________________

— Alan, February 15, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Snow Moon over the Science Centre


Here’s the Full Moon of February rising over the place I work, the science centre in Calgary, called TELUS Spark.

I took this Tuesday evening, February 7, on the night of what is sometimes called the Snow Moon. I knew the Full Moon would rise in the northeast and worked out, with the help of a useful iPad app, just where to stand on the hill above the science centre to get the Moon rising over the science centre. Though it did take a last minute move of a hundred feet to place the Moon over the front entrance!

The building glows from the light of banks of LEDs that can be programmed to slowly change colour. The parking lot lights are all nicely shielded, as any astronomically friendly place should be, to prevent light spilling upward. The odd structure to the left contains the new digital dome theatre, which opens this spring. The dome screen is being installed this month. The dome will feature a Digistar 4 projection system with two pairs of very high-end Sony 4K video projectors, for interactive star shows and full-dome movies. Maybe even laser shows!

Should be fun!

— Alan, February 8, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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The Venus Express


A train winds through the Rockies, seemingly headed for Venus!

I took this shot last Saturday night at one of my favourite photo stops in Banff, the famed Morant’s Curve on the Bow Valley Parkway. This was the spot made famous in the 1930s and 1940s by CPR photographer Nicholas Morant who hauled his large format view camera around western Canada shooting scenes of the Canadian Pacific Railway and classic steam engines at work hauling through the Rockies. At this location the train winds alongside the Bow River heading up to the continental divide marked by the line of peaks in the distance.

On this night, Venus shone brightly over the peaks surrounding Lake Louise. A westbound train heads off into the distance. In a few minutes it’ll be over the divide and descending Kicking Horse Pass into Field, B.C. and Yoho National Park. It’ll never reach Venus!

— Alan, February 7, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

 

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Lake Louise by Moonlight – in Winter


Moments before taking the photo featured in the previous blog I captured this scene, from the footbridge over Louise Creek flowing out of Lake Louise.

This is one of the world’s great photo spots, but here the scene is lit by moonlight and by the Chateau’s and skating rink lights. Jupiter is the bright object above Mt. St. Piran at right.

This was a magical night. Just step away from the artificial lights, let your eyes adjust and a stunning nightscape appeared. Compare this scene to the one I shot from a few steps away but in August and featured in my blog Lake Louise by Moonlight. The blue glacial waters of the summer scene are here replaced by snow and ice.

— Alan, February 5, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer

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Orion Over the Cozy Cabin


Here’s a picture postcard winter scene, one that thousands of people walk by each day — by day.

This is the Swiss guide cabin at Lake Louise, but seen at night. Light from the Moon just off the frame at top illuminates the scene, while Orion stands in the sky over the cabin and Mount Fairview.

I took this shot Saturday night, February 4, 2012, as one of many shots that night at Lake Louise, under crystal clear skies. It was a winter wonderland and a night photographer’s paradise.

Nightscape shots like this are surprisingly easy to take — typically being 20 to 40 seconds at f/2 to f/4 and ISO 400 to 800 with a good DSLR. The exact settings depend on how bright the Moon is. I used the Canon 5D MkII and 24mm Canon lens, a fine combination for night shooting.

— Alan, February 5, 2012 / © @2012  Alan Dyer

 

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Calgary Lights Up


I’m getting the hang of shooting demanding day-to-night time-lapse movies!

For this clip I shot over 2.5 hours, using a fish-eye lens, to create a sequence suitable for projection in a digital planetarium dome.

But the trick with these day-to-night sequences is getting a smooth transition in exposures, which can range over 12 to 16 f-stops, from short snapshot exposures with the lens stopped all the way down at the start before sunset, to long 8-second exposures with the lens wide open at night, plus the camera’s ISO speed increasing from a slow ISO 100 to a faster ISO 400 or more at select points through the sequence as well.

The secret to doing this is a control box called the Little Bramper, an intervalometer that fires the shutter automatically at set intervals but also gradually ramps the exposure time a tad longer with each successive exposure. This was my third time out with the Bramper, and I more or less got it right this time!

While the Bramper does a great job running the camera, it still takes a lot of manual oversight to control its ramping rate so the exposures don’t get too long and overexpose the scene, or fail to get long enough to track the darkening sky.

At several points in the sequence it is also necessary to quickly (in one exposure cycle) half the exposure time, while at the same time opening up the lens a stop, or doubling the ISO, so that the ever-lengthening exposure doesn’t get too long and collide with the interval between exposures. In this case, shots were taken about 12 seconds apart, so the maximum exposure for each frame couldn’t be much more than 8 to 10 seconds.

The end result of the work is a time-lapse movie that shows the setting Sun, then the lights of Calgary coming on as the sky darkens. Clouds lit by the yellow glow of streetlights move in, then blow away again to reveal a few stars in the urban sky.

— Alan, October 16, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Little Church on the Prairie


In honour of Canadian Thanksgiving, here’s a shot from last night of a classic little church on the Canadian Prairie.

This is the long abandoned Catholic church at the hamlet of Dorothy, Alberta. The church was built in 1944, but as the coal mines in the Drumheller valley shut down (blame the invention of Diesel trains and the discovery of natural gas in Alberta) the once bustling town of Dorothy decayed into a ghost town. A few people still live there, but its main attractions are its relics of the pioneer age — this church, and the United church next to it (behind the camera), a picturesque grain elevator, and an old store. The companion United church has been restored, but this little church on the prairie, abandoned since 1967, awaits restoration.

The scene is lit by the gibbous Moon, and by a couple of sodium vapour streetlights, ubiquitous even in a ghost town.

In the sky are the stars of the Big Dipper and Polaris above the church.

This is one frame of 300 I shot over three hours as part of a motion-controlled time-lapse movie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

— Alan, October 10, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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September Milky Way


 

This was the scene from my rural backyard on Tuesday night, September 20, with the Milky Way at its best across the sky.

September usually brings the best nights of the year for dark-sky observing and shooting the Milky Way. Nights are clear, dry, and transparent. The Milky Way stretches across the sky from southwest to northeast in the early evening.

Under clear skies on Tuesday the dark lanes and structure of the Milky Way really stood out, both to the eye and to the camera. Image processing for contrast does bring out the dust lanes, including the subtle patches off the main Milky Way band.

The centre of the image contains the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle. They frame the bright Cygnus starclouds and glowing red nebulas that mark the spiral arm that we live in. Above, at top left in the image, is a bluer section of the Milky Way formed by the more distant Perseus spiral arm, the one further out from us in the Galaxy.

I took this shot with the Canon 5D MkII and Canon 15mm lens, for a stack of five 6-minute exposures at f/4 and ISO 800.

— Alan, September 21, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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Time-Lapse Test: Adding Motion Control


Here’s the movie I show being taken in my previous blog. This is my first attempt at a motion-control time-lapse.

In this movie the camera shifted position during the 3 hours of shooting by sliding along a rail, with the movement controlled by a little computer box that opened and closed the shutter (in this case for 15 seconds for each frame), then between each exposure it pulsed the motor to shift the camera a centimetre or so down the dolly’s rail. 

Pretty nifty! And until this unit, the Stage Zero Dolly, came along this capability would have cost much more money, from some Hollywood cinema supplier.

This was only a test, and I did mess up at one point (where I appear in the frame in the previous blog’s movie) as I tried to adjust the speed in mid-track, resulting in some dead motion for a few frames. So the motion comes to a halt briefly. It will take some learning to know how to set the speed right for the number of frames and exposure times I typically shoot.

But the ramping up in speed at the beginning of this movie is intentional, and is one of the motion control variables you can program in. 

The Stage Zero Dolly unit is from Dynamic Perception LLC. Lots of time-lapse shooters are employing it now, for their cinema-like pans and moves. I’ve been inspired by the work of Randy Halverson at http://dakotalapse.com/ . Amazing stuff — representing a whole new level of time-lapse techniques. 

So now I know what I’ll be doing now on moonlit evenings! 

— Alan, September 12, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Time-Lapse of a Time-Lapse


I’ve been taking lots of time-lapse movies of late. But this one is a time-lapse movie of my other camera taking a time-lapse movie.

Here you see my Canon 7D camera riding aboard my latest tool (or toy!), a motion-control dolly. The camera takes its series of still images (that will be later stitched together into a movie) while it tracks down a rail, riding on a motorized cart.

The unit is called the Stage Zero Dolly, from Dynamic Perception LLC. It is a nifty device that fires the camera shutter for the exposure time and interval you desire. In between each exposure it also moves the camera a small amount down the track. The result can be seen in the next blog, a time-lapse movie with a changing perspective, giving a cinema-style dolly shot. Except, I took this one over 3 hours.

While this scene might look like I took it during the day, it is the middle of the night (witness the moving stars). The blue sky is due to moonlight, from an almost Full Moon on September 10.

The Stage Zero Dolly takes some work to set up and program right, but the results open up a whole new dimension (literally!) in time-lapse shooting.

— Alan, September 12, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Milky Way over Peyto Lake


 

What a night this was! This was the view Sunday night, September 4, from the Peyto Lake viewpoint, of the Milky Way arching overhead, on a clear night at 7,000 feet altitude near the timberline of Bow Summit.

This is one frame of 275 of a time-lapse movie I took of the stars turning over Peyto Lake. This frame catches the Moon just as it sets over Peyto Glacier at left. At this altitude the Milky Way was obvious even with the Moon still in the sky.

It was a scene of a starry night that Bill Peyto would have enjoyed. As he wrote of nearby Bow Lake (see my shot here) … “Around the fire tonight Jim [Jimmy Simpson] said that for his money this campsite was the closest one could get to Heaven on Earth and I reckon he’s not far wrong.”

— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Big Dipper over Peyto Lake


 

After taking the twilight shots at Waterfowl Lakes on Sunday night (click back to the previous blog), I continued up the Icefields Parkway, ascending to Bow Summit and the viewpoint that overlooks one of the most famous scenes in the Canadian Rockies, Peyto Lake.

Named for legendary mountain man and guide Bill Peyto, the lake was a favourite place for him, to give him solitude away from the madding crowds of Banff.

As with so many of these places, by day this very spot swarms with tourists by the bus load. Peyto would have cringed. But at nightfall, I am the only one there, enjoying the stars coming out in the solitude of the darkening sky.

Here, we look north, to the Big Dipper and Arcturus over the lake in the valley below.

This is a single exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 800 with the Canon 7D and 10-22mm lens.

— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Twilight at Waterfowl Lakes


 

About half an hour after I took the previous blog entry image, I was here on Sunday evening, farther down the Icefields Parkway, at the shore of Lower Waterfowl Lake. The peak is Mt. Cephren.

The Sun had set and the sky was now filled with the purple glow of twilight marking the beginning of an exceptionally clear night.

Capturing this scene as the eye saw it took a stack of 7 different exposures, combined in what is known as a High Dynamic Range image, that blends the shadows details in the foreground without losing the subtle tints of the bright sky.

— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Moon over Saskatchewan River Crossing


 

This is how the night started, on Sunday evening, September 4 — as clear a night as you could ask for in the mountains. A quarter Moon hangs over the peaks of the Continental Divide, with alpen glow, the last rays of the Sun, illuminating the mountains around Saskatchewan River Crossing, in Banff.

The North Saskatchewan River flows east out of the mountains here, after being joined by the Mistaya and Howse rivers. It was here, in the early 1800s, that David Thompson and his party of fur traders from the North West Company entered the Rockies and heading up over Howse Pass off frame to the right, to trade with the Kootenays in the interior of what is now British Columbia.

This is David Thompson country, named for one of the world’s greatest geographers and mapmakers. He mapped most of western Canada and down into the Oregon Territory. All using compasses, sextants, a Dolland refractor telescope (to observe the moons of Jupiter for telling time), and his skills as an astronomer. The Kootenays called him Koo-Koo-Sint — the man who watches the stars.

It was also here, on these open river plains, that James Hector, mapping southern Alberta with the Palliser Expedition, observed Comet Donati in September 1858.

This is a place in the Rockies with many ties to history and to astronomy.

— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Bow Lake by Moonlight (The Movie)


Here is the time-lapse movie I took last Saturday night, August 20, on a perfect night at Bow Lake in Banff, Alberta.

The sequence starts in bright twilight then darkens to full night with the Milky Way over the  mountain silhouettes. The peaks then light up as they catch the light of the rising last quarter Moon coming up about 11:30 pm in the east. The moonlight creeps down the mountains to light up the entire valley and the lake. The sky brightens to deep blue again. The sequence ends about 3:30 am.

There was hardly a cloud in the sky all night, unusual for locations near the large icefields that straddle the continental divide.

I assembled the movie from 454 frames, each 40 seconds in exposure time, and taken 1 second apart.

— Alan, August 24, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Bow Lake By Moonlight


This was a truly magical scene — the Milky Way over Bow Glacier, and mountains lit by moonlight and reflected in the waters of Bow Lake.

Last Saturday night, August 20, 2011, brought some of the clearest skies I’ve seen in the Rockies. To take advantage of them, I headed to Bow Lake, in Banff, a favourite and very photogenic location for day and nighttime shooting. I hadn’t been there at night since the film days, pre-2004.

This shot is one of 450 frames taken as part of a time-lapse sequence, showing the Milky Way moving over Bow Lake. Here, at about 2 a.m. the light from the rising last quarter Moon is illuminating the peaks, and the Milky Way is perfectly placed over the end of Bow Lake and Bow Glacier, source of the waters of the Bow River and what Calgarians drink!

The sky is blue from moonlight. Last quarter moons are wonderful for nightscapes — providing enough light to illuminate the landscape but not so much as to wash out the sky and Milky Way. But making use of that phase of the Moon means very late nights of shooting. I packed it in this night at 4 a.m.

— Alan, August 22, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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Space Station Over the Rockies


This was the view Friday night, August 19, 2011, as the International Space Station flew over Banff, Alberta and the Canadian Rockies.

I took this shot (actually this is a composite of three successive exposures) from the viewpoint on Mt. Norquay overlooking the Banff townsite and the Trans-Canada Highway interchange, unfortunately all too well lit. This might well be a case study in light pollution as well.

But the lights in the valley don’t diminish the Milky Way above, and the sky-wide streak created by the passage from west to east of the Space Station. What looks like a brilliant star to the eye turns into a streak here due to the three 45-second time exposures I used to capture this scene. The lens is the 8mm fish-eye, and these frames are from a 400-frame time-lapse movie for the planetarium dome.

— Alan, August 20, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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Lake Louise by Moonlight — The Movie


Here is the time-lapse movie I took last Saturday night at Lake Louise, Alberta, under the light of the Full Moon. My previous blog featured a still frame from the beginning of this sequence.

The night starts clear, but as often happens, clouds move in, blowing off the cold icefields of the continental divide. It does make for a nice effect in time-lapse, one of few instances in astronomy where some clouds can be useful!

Also notice how the reflection disappears as the lake breaks up into waves briefly, as wind blows in now and then through the night. The Full Moon is rising behind the camera, causing the lake to light up as moonlight illuminates more of the lake’s surface. Shadows move across the mountainsides. Arcturus is the bright star setting at right. The red object at left is a moored canoe, moving about on the lake.

I took this movie over 4 hours from 10:30 pm to 2:30 am, taking 477 frames with the Canon 7D and 10mm lens. For time-lapse movies like this, I process the full-size RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge, then use Photoshop’s Image Processor to export them all to smaller size JPGs. From that set, I use Photoshop CS5 Extended’s “Motion” feature to assemble the folder of JPGs into a movie, in this case at 24 frames per second, a little fast perhaps for this sequence, but it’s easy to change if needed. Photoshop then renders that image file out as a Quicktime movie. What you see here is a tiny version of the final HD-sized video.

— Alan, August 16, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Lake Louise by Moonlight


This has to be one of the most photogenic and photographed places in the world. Here it is in a different light, moonlight.

This is Lake Louise, in Banff National Park, Alberta. A few hours before I took this photo on Saturday, August 13, where I stood would have been swarming with thousands of people. But at midnight there was no one about. I had the view to myself.

This looks like a daytime shot, except the stars give it away. Instead, it is the Full Moon, behind the camera, providing the illumination. Contrary to Hollywood lighting clichés, moonlight is not blue. It is the same colour as sunlight, because it is sunlight, just much fainter, reflected off the Moon’s neutral grey surface.

In this view we are looking southwest, toward the stars of the summer sky setting behind the peaks of the continental divide. Arcturus is the bright star at right.

A calm night provided the glassy lake to reflect Mount Victoria and Victoria Glacier.

This is one frame of 477 30-second exposures I took over 4 hours, of the stars turning and eventually clouds blowing in across the sky from the icefields over the divide. It’s rare to get such a perfectly clear night in the Rockies. It was a wonderful to be there, and apparently to be the only one there, to experience it.

— Alan, August 14, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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Sunset in the City — This is Only a Test!


This is one for the time-lapse geeks!

One of the trickiest subjects for a time-lapse sequence is a smooth and seamless day-to-night transition. Exposure times vary from fractions of a second before sunset to several seconds at night fall.

How to do it? Manually shifting exposures is too much work and prone to error. Putting the camera on Automatic can work but inevitably results in an effect known in the time-lapse world as “flickering.” The camera’s automatically-judged exposures aren’t consistent from frame to frame so the final movie shows minor bright/dark flickering, making it look jerky.

For this test sequence of sunset over the Calgary skyline, I tried a new toy for the first time, as a solution.

The device is called the Little Bramper (for Bulb Ramping). It is a custom-made intervalometer that fires the camera shutter every few seconds (at whatever interval you desire). Nothing new there. But what’s unique is that it can be set to slowly increment the exposure time by as little as 1/1000th of a second from frame to frame, gradually increasing the exposure (“ramping” it) to accommodate the darkening scene. The result is a smooth transition from day to night with no flickering.

This was my first use of the Bramper and it wasn’t without its glitches. The shortest exposure the Bramper can provide (it always controls the camera thru its Bulb setting) is about 1/10th of a second (I had no idea camera shutters can fire as quickly as that even on Bulb).

But at the beginning of a sequence like this, with a bright sky, achieving that exposure (still quite long) means using a small f-stop, a slow ISO speed, or a neutral density filter, or all of the above. But as the sky darkens and exposures lengthen, exposures would become too long to fit within the desired interval between frames (typically no more than 5 to 10 seconds for a smooth sequence). So, to shorten the exposures you then have to open up the lens, switch to a faster ISO, or remove the ND filter, while also commanding the Bramper to quickly reduce its exposure time, all in one exposure cycle (i.e. 5 to 10 seconds) so as not to lose or ruin frames. Takes some coordination and practice (hit the Bramper’s button, adjust the camera, all within 5 seconds), and I didn’t get it right the first couple of times.

But overall, for a first test, the sequence turned out very well. The $80 Little Bramper does the job, though it does take careful monitoring through the sequence, not just to perform the exposure swaps, but to also watch that the ramping rate (adjustable on the fly) matches what the scene is doing and you aren’t under- or over-exposing. It’ll take a little more practice, but the results certainly are worth it.

It’s another neat tool in the time-lapse arsenal.

— Alan, August 10, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Moon in the Mountains


I’ve been chasing the Moon this week. I caught up with it last Thursday night, August 4, in Banff, with the waxing crescent Moon low in the southwest at dusk.

The location is the upper Vermilion Lake just outside the Banff townsite. The golden reflection of the low Moon on the water, the slope of the mountainside and its reflection, the dock and steps, and the tail lights from a vehicle on Highway 1 just up the hill (I decided to leave them in!) make for what I think is an interesting composition of converging lines.

I got set up and in position just in time to catch the scene at the magic hour of twilight, when the sky is dark enough the show deep colours and the Moon’s entire disk shows up, but before the sky gets too dark and the Moon too bright to make an interesting scene.

Even so, the contrast in such a scene is still very high. So to capture it more as your eye would have seen it I used a stack of five exposures, taken in rapid succession, each 2/3rds of an f-stop apart. I then merged the frames with Photoshop’s High Dynamic Range routine to create a scene that brings out detail in the foreground without overexposing the Moon and sky.

A technical method to capture a simple scene of serenity in the mountains.

— Alan, August 7, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Sacred Site: The Movie


Here’s my time-lapse sequence of the hoodoos at Writing-on-Stone Park lighting up as the Moon rises and the Milky Way sets.

The sky starts off dark but lights up as the waning Moon, off frame behind the camera, rises and lights up the foreground and sky. The sequence ends as the sky brightens with the onset of dawn.

Waning moons are great nights for this type of shooting as the changing lighting produces dramatic effects as the landscape lights up at moonrise. The problem is, the Moon doesn’t rise till very late, making for a long night of shooting.

I assembled this sequence from 290 frames, each a 60-second exposure, taken at 1-second intervals over about 4 hours. The camera was the Canon 7D and the lens the 10-22mm Canon EF-S zoom at 10mm. I also shot a matching sequence simultaneously with the 8mm fish-eye and Canon 5D MkII camera, for an all-sky sequence for planetarium use.

— Alan, July 30, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Sacred Site


Standing among these “hoodoo” rock formations at night with moonlight and starlight for illumination was a magical moment. This is a scene at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta, that I took last Saturday night, July 23, 2001 at 3 a.m.

It shows the summer Milky Way arching over the sandstone formations, with the rocks lit by the light of the rising waning Moon in the east.

Writing-on-Stone is a sacred site for First Nations people, a place to connect to the spirit world through dreamquests. No one lived here — it was a place haunted by the spirits — people only visited at special times. The rocks were also used to record visions and historic events, in the form of carved petroglyphs that are among the best preserved and most extensive of any archaeological sites in North America. By day or by night, Writing-on-Stone is an inspiring location, carved in the rocks on the banks of the Milk River (see the previous blogs for some panoramic sunset views of the area).

This is one frame of about 300 taken as part of a time-lapse movie, and is a 60-second exposure with the Canon 7D and 10-22mm lens.

— Alan, July 30, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Stars Over Waterton Lakes II


When I’m doing time-lapse sequences I often run two cameras, one with a wide-angle lens for a frame-filling rectangular view for “normal” HD movies (that’s what’s in the previous blog post), and another camera with a fish-eye lens for a circular format “all-sky” view. These scenes are for projection in full-dome digital planetariums.

This still image is one frame of 470 that I took over four hours on the night of July 20/21, showing the stars and clouds moving in the sky over Waterton Lakes National Park and the stately Prince of Wales Hotel on the bluff across the bay. North is at the bottom of the frame in this shot.

I took this image about 11:30 pm when the sky still had some twilight glow in it and just before the waning Moon was about to rise at right. So the eastern sky has a glow from the impending moonrise. However, the sky is dark enough that the Milky Way shows up running across the sky and down toward the hotel.

You can also see the Big Dipper at left and Cassiopeia at right. The Summer Triangle stars are at top right, in the south. Polaris, the North Star, is dead centre.

— Alan, July 22, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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Stars over Waterton Lakes


One of my favourite places is Waterton Lakes National Park. Even now, in 2011, the little town seems like Banff was back in the 1960s, before huge developments, resort hotels and endless shopping malls. Even at peak season the town is quiet and laid back.

It’s been a while since I had visited Waterton but was determined to this summer. A couple of days here yielded one clear night and a couple of 4-hour time-lapse sequences of stars turning over Waterton’s landmark, the Prince of Wales Hotel.

The hotel is a wood chalet-like structure built in 1927 by the Great Northern Railway as one in a chain of grand railway hotels. It sits on a bluff overlooking Waterton Lakes and remains the elegant place to stay or dine while in Waterton.

For this shot I set up at the end of the marina dock, looking north toward Polaris, the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia. This is a single 30-second exposure taken in deep twilight at the beginning of the night with the 10-22mm lens and Canon 7D camera. It’s one of 400+ frames taken for a time-lapse sequence. While lights from the hotel interior are somewhat picturesque and inviting it’s a pity that national parks still employ unshielded sodium vapour lights on roads. The streetlights are so bright and glaring they actually illuminate the mountainsides.

— Alan, July 22, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

 

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Circling the Sky II


My encounter with the old farmstead near home continued the next night (after the shot featured in the previous blog), under another stunningly clear moonlit sky. Here I let the camera fire away for three and half hours, producing a rather neat juxtaposition of surreal starfield above an abandoned old farmhouse.

For this shot I stacked 660 17-second exposures that were taken in rapid succession at one second intervals. I used the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800 and Sigma 8mm lens  at f/4.5.

My workflow for an image like this is to…:

1. Use Adobe’s Photo Downloader to download all the images from the camera card into a folder on a local hard drive, then open Adobe Bridge to inspect them. Toss out any junk shots at the beginning and end of the set.

2. Open a representative image in the sequence using Adobe Camera Raw and process it for Colour Correction, Contrast, Noise Reduction, Vibrance, Fill Light (to bring out shadow detail) and Recovery (to recover details in highlights).

3. Then in Bridge, go under Edit: Develop Settings: Copy Camera Raw Settings.

4. Select all the images (Select All) and then Paste Camera Raw Settings. This applies that custom setting to all the images in the sequence in one fell swoop. 600+ images processed in seconds! Sometimes it can take a few iterations to get a good setting that works well through the whole set.

5. Then Select All again in Bridge and go under Tools: Photoshop: Image Processor. This open Photoshop itself and brings up a dialog box that allows you to convert those processed RAW files into other formats (JPGs, TIFFs, etc. in whatever size you want). For this type of single image I convert the RAWs into full resolution TIFFs. While I am at it, I’ll also convert each image into a smaller-sized (1080 pixels high) JPG. The folder of JPGs are for creating an HD-format time-lapse movie from the same set of images. Image Processor can create two sets of images simultaneously from the same RAW master. Very nice.

6. This will take a while as Image Processor dutifully opens up each image one by one and creates a TIFF (and a JPG, too, if you like) from each RAW file in another folder. Go for a very leisurely coffee!

7. Once a folder of finished TIFFs is there, I can use Chris Schur’s Photoshop Action to take each of those images and stack them one by one into a single image. That process can take hours with full-res TIFFs. Start it before you go to bed! Slow, yes, but it’s better than doing it all by hand.

8. The final image can still use touch-ups, to sharpen, alter the brightness and contrast of the sky (frames taken when the sky was still bright with twilight can make the scene look too bright).

It can take a day’s worth of computer crunching to get a final image. But the result is certainly unique.

— Alan, July 20, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Circling the Sky


It has been an incredible week for imaging. Clear skies and a bright Moon are the tickets to nightscape photography. And in the last week we’ve had clear moonlit nights in abundance.

I’ve taken advantage of the run of great weather to shoot an old farmstead down the road from my house, on several nights. This is a shot from the first night out, on Thursday, July 14. It is a fish-eye lens shot taking in most of the sky, and looking north at the bottom of the frame. The star trails, taken over 2 hours, circle around the North Star (or close to it).

So why is the sky blue? The Full Moon, just out of the frame at top, is illuminating the landscape and sky — and light from the Full Moon is the same colour as light from the Sun (because that’s what moonlight is! — reflected sunlight). It’s just that moonlight is much dimmer. Expose long enough and you get a scene that looks like daylight but has the stars in it.

To create this image I took 400 18-second exposures, taken 1 second apart, using the Canon 5D MkII camera at ISO 800 and the Sigma 8mm lens at f/5. I stacked the images using an automated “action” for Photoshop developed  by astrophotographer Chris Schur. The original frames can also be strung together in sequence to create a time-lapse movie of the sky turning, suitable, in this case, for projection in a full-dome digital planetarium. I’ll post some of those shortly.

But after several nights of shooting till 3 and 4 a.m., and accumulating 100 gigabytes or more of RAW files, it’s time to take a night off and turn in early! At 1 a.m.!

— Alan, July 19, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Moon Over Banff Springs Hotel


A weekend in Banff National Park — but three cloudy nights foiled the array of starry time-lapse shots I had hoped to take. But on Sunday night, July 10, I did get a nice evening shot of the Moon over the most famous Banff landmark.

This is the Banff Springs Hotel, in the deepening twilight as the gibbous Moon shone over Sulphur Mountain behind the hotel. I shot this from the overlook across the Bow River on Tunnel Mountain Drive, a popular spot by day for tourists to disembark by the busload and get their requisite shot. But at this time of night, about 11 p.m., I was the only one there. That’s the beauty of nightscape photography — you have the scene to yourself! And the bears.

Banff Springs is the epitome of a grand hotel. Opened in 1888 but since reconstructed and added to several times, the hotel was built by the Canadian Pacific Railway as the focal point for the tourists it planned to bring into the new Rocky Mountain Park, to take “the waters” in the Park’s sulphur hot springs and enjoy mountain wilderness in genteel splendour. I had the pleasure of staying there one night, in an upper room, courtesy of the Hotel as part of an astronomy outreach program we did there for Earth Hour in 2010. It was truly splendid!

For this shot, I combined three different exposures (1/2 second, 1.3 seconds and 3.4 seconds) in a High Dynamic Range stack, to bring out dark foreground detail but retain the still bright sky, and prevent the Moon from becoming too overexposed. So some Photoshop trickery was involved. But unlike many picture postcard scenes of the Moon sitting above a landmark, this one is real and has not had the Moon pasted into place, usually in a spot and orientation that is astronomically impossible! We astronomers hate that!

— Alan, July 11, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer

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Galaxyrise


In the southern hemisphere sky we are treated to the stunning sight of the centre of the Galaxy rising each night, as the starfields of Scorpius and Sagittarius come up over the eastern horizon. In this shot, taken last night (May 2/3), we see the Milky Way’s heart rising behind some of the robotic, remotely-controlled domes and telescopes at the Atacama Lodge in Chile. Only the centre dome is operating, taking images or data under the command of someone half a world away.

Amazing technology to be sure, but … that robotic observer misses the experience of standing under the Milky Way, watching its heart rise over the Andes and swing overhead through the night. The Milky Way is so bright it lights the ground, as you can see here.

Last night our little group of 7 Canadian observers had a fantastic time exploring the southern sky with several telescopes, including an 18-inch reflector set up for us by lodge owner Alain Maury. With the help of a couple of wide-angle eyepieces we saw wonderful views of the Vela Supernova Remnant, dark nebulas in the Milky Way, and showpiece targets like Omega Centauri and the Tarantula Nebula – the list goes on! And will again tonight, as we compile another “hit-list” of targets to find tonight.

For this shot, I used the Canon 7D camera, a 15mm lens, and ISO 2500 for a 40 second exposure at f/2.8. This is one of about 500 frames taken for a time-lapse movie of “Galaxyrise.”

– Alan, May 3, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer