Archive 2015 · Milky Way at Big Sur

xjtian
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Milky Way at Big Sur

Finally, after 2 weeks, the moonrise was late enough out here in NorCal to go out and shoot some stars. I checked the clear sky charts on Saturday and saw some very, very promising forecasts down in Big Sur, so I made the 2.5 hour drive down to McWay Falls hoping to get a good shot of the Milky Way.

First impression - it is seriously dark out there! I grew up on the East coast and now live in South Bay, so I've never experienced a truly dark sky before. Walking out to my spot in what effectively was pitch blackness was super eerie (thank goodness I had a strong torch with me). Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was totally blown away at the volume of stars in the sky. It was absolutely mindblowing!

This shot is a composite of 30 exposures. I stacked 20 for the foreground at f/2-30"-ISO3200, and 10 for the sky at f/2-30"-ISO16000. I definitely felt limited by shooting with a crop body (A6000) in this situation, but after median stacking and dark frame subtraction, things turned out pretty decently. If I had an intervalometer, I would have liked to have bumped up the exposure time for the foreground to something like 5 minutes and dropped the ISO to 400 or 800, but I only had my IR remote so I had to shoot at 3200 (30" is the longest non-bulb shutter on the A6000).

20150905-DSC07341-Edit-Edit-Edit-2 by Jacky Tian, on Flickr

Sep 07, 2015 at 04:21 PM

dakel
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Milky Way at Big Sur

Stunning shot!

Sep 07, 2015 at 05:00 PM

DougVaughn
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Milky Way at Big Sur

Nice shot. Processing feel pretty natural to me... not overdone.

Sep 07, 2015 at 05:58 PM

xjtian
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Milky Way at Big Sur

DougVaughn wrote:
Nice shot. Processing feel pretty natural to me... not overdone.

Thank you! It was somewhat tough to composite the shots together because after dark frame subtraction the foreground ended up a vastly different color temperature than the sky. If you zoom on on the trees on the left you can probably catch some sloppiness. Oh well... was about the best that I could do!

Sep 07, 2015 at 06:39 PM

JimFox
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Milky Way at Big Sur

This is pretty nice, though I do wish the foreground was a little brighter. As for doing a 5 min exposure with the IR Remote, most remotes like that will have a mode where you hold the button down for 3 seconds and then it locks in the shutter until you press it again, you should check that as then you could have done a 5 min exposure on Bulb mode. Otherwise, you just need a simple $20 wired remote that you can lock in.

How did you do Median stacking on the sky? With the movement of the stars I figured Median stacking would not work as the stars would streak.

Jim

Sep 08, 2015 at 03:55 AM

xjtian
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Milky Way at Big Sur

JimFox wrote:
This is pretty nice, though I do wish the foreground was a little brighter. As for doing a 5 min exposure with the IR Remote, most remotes like that will have a mode where you hold the button down for 3 seconds and then it locks in the shutter until you press it again, you should check that as then you could have done a 5 min exposure on Bulb mode. Otherwise, you just need a simple $20 wired remote that you can lock in.

How did you do Median stacking on the sky? With the movement of the stars I...Show more →

Thinking about it now, I should have shot the foreground bulbbed. My remote is capable of setting off a bulb exposure, but I didn't want to have to time a bunch of exposures for stacking manually. Thought I could get away with 3200 on the A6k body if I stacked 20 frames, but that was clearly not the case.

For stacking the sky, I pulled the sky layers into PS, then applied a quick-and-dirty mask over the foreground for one of the layers, and copied it to all the others. Then I auto-aligned the layers, converted them to a SO, and set stack mode to Median. It's a pretty simple process, only 1 more step than stacking for the foreground.

Sep 08, 2015 at 01:27 PM

psharvic
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Milky Way at Big Sur

Excellent milky way picture.

Sep 08, 2015 at 07:24 PM

Ipanematom
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Milky Way at Big Sur

Wow! Great shot!

Sep 09, 2015 at 11:23 AM

JimFox
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Milky Way at Big Sur

xjtian wrote:
Thinking about it now, I should have shot the foreground bulbbed. My remote is capable of setting off a bulb exposure, but I didn't want to have to time a bunch of exposures for stacking manually. Thought I could get away with 3200 on the A6k body if I stacked 20 frames, but that was clearly not the case.

For stacking the sky, I pulled the sky layers into PS, then applied a quick-and-dirty mask over the foreground for one of the layers, and copied it to all the others. Then I auto-aligned the layers, converted them to a SO, and...Show more →

Thanks for the detail on the Median stacking for the stars. I never thought of auto-aligning the stars, so I thought that Median stacking wouldn't work since the stars are obviously moving between each frame. I will have to give that a shot then next time.

Jim

Sep 09, 2015 at 12:40 PM

Markus L
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Milky Way at Big Sur

That's a really sweet shot there. The processing of it sounds pretty complicated, but you definitely did a good job!

Sep 09, 2015 at 04:20 PM

Bart Carrig
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Milky Way at Big Sur

That's a very nice image. Well done, and well processed.

Bart

Sep 09, 2015 at 07:40 PM


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