Really big night sky panorama.

A while back I took a bunch of night sky photographs from our orchard. a few of them where looking across at Waihola with the night sky above. I have been seeing allot of really nice looking panoramic images that have the milky way curving overhead and have been wanting to try to make one of my own. 

I took an 11 photo panorama with the intention of stitching them together at some point. The stitching together part proved to be much more involved then I had originally thought. I ended up having to manually put all of the images together and then do allot of Photoshop futzing with each image to get them to align properly. Then came colour correction and lighting to try and merge the colours and lighting better.

The result is still not perfect so I'm going to have to try again with a new set of images. For a beginning try it didn't come out too bad.

11 Photo Large format panorama of the night sky over Waihola.

Startrails, stacking method with Tutorial

I have been doing a little research lately about some different methods to create night sky imagery. Mainly in an effort to improve my own night sky images. 

I came across this method of creating star trail images while looking for ways to fix my problems with exposure in star trails. Basically what you do is take a whole bunch of images on a tripod using a remote timer and then use a computer program to "Stack" the images together. This method gives you far greater control over the exposure level of the final image and allows you to get trails that are as long as you want. The more images you have the longer the trails.

I used Photoshop to create this image using some of the images I took to create a time lapse earlier last month.

Star trail created using stacked images.

Here's how.

1. In Photoshop go to: File then down to Scripts and select "Load Files into Stack".
2. A new window will pop up. Select "Browse" and locate the files that you wish to stack.
3. Select ALL of the files you want to import, click "OK". they will all appear in the use files box in the window. (Don't worry about checking the "register images" box if your images where taken using a tripod.) Click "OK".
4. Photoshop will load all of the images into a single file on many layers. This may take a while depending on the amount of images in your stack.
5. Once complete, Select all of the layers except the bottom most one.
6. In the blend mode pull down menu on the layers tab select "Lighten".
7. You should now have a whole lot of star trails.
8. Flatten the image and "Save As" something new so you don't loose any of your original images.

Dark Sky

It was another lovely clear dark sky again last night so I was out again with my camera. This time I had an idea to try and get an image with one of the newly opened flowers on our camellia bush in the foreground and the night sky as a backdrop. Well that plan went out of the window after I had taken a couple of initial images. It was just too dark to see anything of the foreground apart from the silhouette of the leaves and a very slight pink smudge where the flower should be. 

I will have to wait until the moon is out again at night and in the first quarter or last quarter phase so its not too bright to get the shot I was after. Still the silhouette is really nice so I'll post them anyway!

Ta Geoff