We’re being treated to a nice show in the night sky right now! From left to right, Mars, the the Galactic Center of the Milky Way, and Jupiter are all in alignment earlier in the night. Pluto and Saturn are in there too, but Pluto is too small to see, and Saturn is to the left and up from the Lagoon Nebula in the Galactic Center. It was dumb luck that I caught this scene, I was vaguely aware of the planetary alignment happening but I’ve been so busy with projects and preparing for teaching workshops that I had no idea I was going to capture such a beautiful sight until I was out shooting, so needless to say I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to get this composition of Mars and Jupiter flanking the Galactic Center!
Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm lens @ 14mm, f/2.8. The sky is a star stacked blend of 7 shots for low noise and pinpoint stars, stacked in Starry Landscape Stacker for macOS, but you can do this in Sequator for Windows (or other programs but those are the easiest for star stacking landscape astro images). The 7 shots were each at ISO 6400, 10 seconds. The foreground is from a 20 second shot taken less than 2 minutes before I took the exposures for the sky. The tide was going out and on the mudflats it goes out really fast, so the 20 second shot had more water in the foreground on the mudflats, so the reflection of the stars was better, and it was also a sharp reflection since the star stacking was just for the sky, so the star reflections in the water were not aligned with each other and thus blurred in the stacking. I could have done a separate stack for the water in Starry Landscape Stacker to line up the reflections and get low noise, but the 20 second shot had more water and a better reflection. I aligned the foreground star reflections with the reflections of the star stacked image in Photoshop, and masked in the foreground. Noise reduction in Lightroom (before sending the foreground to Photoshop) and Adobe Camera Raw (in Photoshop, which is the same underlying raw editor as Lightroom) was used to reduce the noise on the water.
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Posted by Adam Woodworth on 2018-07-09 13:27:39
Tagged: , astronomy , astrophotography , bold coast , down east , galactic center , jupiter , lubec , maine , marsh , milky way , mudflats , new england , night , planetary alignment , reflection , saturn , sky , stars , bailey’s mistake
