The night was lit by two thirds waxing moon. Still, Orion drifted away in the upper
right as I stacked twenty two six minute shots at f7.1, ISO 400. The final
image was pretty bright, I had to back off a bit. We had a great night
at Nevada's mysterious Pyramid Lake (not the other one, or the other other one).
If you look carefully, you'll see that the stars in the upper left are beginning to
curve upward, while in the lower right they curve much more downward.
At the equator, this effect happens right overhead.
thanks all for viewing. I wish I had been able to get up higher above the lake,
but the terrain was forbidding and the night was darker than appears here.
I didn't flatten until the end, in case there was something I needed to correct.
There was one frame where a car's light sort of fouled things up, so I masked it
out but kept the sky, so I wouldn't have a gap. The image with all of the files
came to a whopping 1 gigabyte! I saved it in PSD format.
But....you can flatten every three or four frames if you want, it'll work fine that way
too.
Ha! Dan's got my music CD. Photography is my default public face but I have some other tricks up my sleeve. About the photo; I have always been hugely impressed with Tokina's 12-24. The lens has given me good astrophotography service, and nothing tests a lens like capturing stars. You know if the edges are distorted because those sweet round dots start smearing and ain't so round at the periphery of the image. I used Nikkor lenses in my early days when I was shooting manual film cameras, and those buggers started producing egg shapes at the periphery. I'll post my other favorite Pyramid Lake photo here in a few minutes. And thanks everyone, I haven't
been around much, I know, but I'm lurking.
.