Night sky

[GoAPPS]

Here's a blue-hour blend photo from a lookout tower along the Blue Ridge Parkway (North Carolina, October 2019).

Using a planning app (PhotoPills), I was able to determine that the Milky Way would align with my position along a colorful ridge line after dark. I took a series of blue hour photos to capture the foreground while it was still dimly lit by the fading twilight. I combined the data of these photos into one image that could pull out the color detail of the foreground landscape.

When dark fell, I took a series of long exposures and combined their data in a program called Sequator. I brought the detail of the Milky Way out of the background using Photoshop, then I blended the foreground data with the night sky data for a composite.

I used a Sony A7RIII camera body and a Sigma 14-24 f/2.8 lens, but you can get similar results with much cheaper setups. It's all in the processing.

When I say "combining data," I'm talking about stacking, a process that aligns several images and averages out the data so that what stays behind is only the pixels that stay the same through the sequence. This eliminates transient objects, like hot pixels and thermal noise - the reason so many low-light photos look so grainy.

The weather conditions were cool and clear, so clear that you can actually see a little airglow in the photo.

[salbers]

Live camera in New Mexico at night, along with sky simulation:

https://stevealbers.net/allsky/allsky_las.html

[LibertyBell]

Sequator is hands down the best program to use for stacking, it removes light pollution and even airplanes from images too!

 

Photopills is pretty good too, I do most of those calculations by sidereal time when dso or stars get close to local landmarks like the top of a tree or nearby house lol.

I usually plan and calculate these times a few months in advance and have several different sessions planned around the days around a new moon to minimize light pollution.