After getting my feet well and truly soaked yesterday evening, it seemed like a good idea to go and stand in near-freezing temperatures for a couple of hours, just up the coast at Porteau Cove Provincial Park.
With a strong wind blowing it was extremely cold, but the first clear night we've had in weeks provided an incredible view.
This is a 5 photo panorama stitched using Hugin, each image taken at ISO 8000, 16mm, for 45 seconds. Due to the projection I had to use to get this to be displayed on a flat screen, it's not as high resolution as that might suggest -- only about 35 megapixels. The projection is also responsible for the slightly curved 'spires' on the right hand side.
This is my first attempt at a night sky panorama, and as expected, it's somewhat tricky due to the stars moving and the ground not!
I was extremely pleased with how the Milky Way turned out, and the Big Dipper is clearly visible near the horizon just to the right of centre. Light domes are from the cities of Nanaimo (I think) on the left and Squamish on the right.
The processing might be a little excessive, even by my 'turn it up to 11' standards, but I couldn't stop myself bringing out more detail!
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
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Seems to be popular!!!!!!! Directed here by HH and really worthwhile.....what an incredible scene, what devotion to photography ie chilblains! just fantastic, a very worthwhile job! +fav
@judithg That's a plane -- surprisingly I don't seem to have captured any shooting stars in this. Another shot I took that night has three, all in a 30 second exposure!
Been sent over by Humphrey Hippo to take a look. A-MAZ-ING - don't know where to start with telling you how absolutely fabulous this pic is, so will just leave it at A-MAZ-ING! Oh and - FAV!
Just saw this on top 20. Congrats! What type place is that? It looks like an electrical station...reminds me of the movie The Prestige with all its Tesla references this is stunning!
did the sky look like that with the naked eye or is it something you were only able to bring out with your camera and processing? Its absolutely incredible.
@espyetta Porteau Cove, as well as a provincial park, is an emergency ferry terminal. Ferries would dock at the bridge-like structure at the left of the photo, with access to the land being along the dock running along the bottom of the photo.
The Sea to Sky highway runs at the foot of of the mountains, and has the Howe Sound immediately to the other side. In the event of an avalanche or landslide, the road could be closed for days or even weeks. The ferry terminal provides the ability to bypass such a closure by linking either to Squamish, to the north, or Horseshoe Cove, to the south.
Without this provision, communities such as Squamish and Whistler would lose easy access to the lower mainland in the event of a closure. As an example, Squamish is about an 65km/1 hour drive from downtown Vancouver. The fastest alternative route by paved road, should the Sea to Sky highway be closed, is 512km/7 hours.
As this happens so rarely, the dock is open to the public and provides various viewing platforms, one of which this photo was taken from.
@jsw0109 There is still quite a lot of ambient light even here, and relatively speaking, the night wasn't particularly ideal for viewing the Milky Way (atmospheric transparency not being as high as it can be). Therefore some processing was required to bring out the Milky Way to this degree.
This primarily consisted of careful application of curves layers to darken the overall glow in the sky and brighten the stars, as well as colour temperature adjustments to keep the sky blue while not turning the foreground structures totally orange (as they are lit only by distant sodium lamps).
Use of the clarity adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw was also used to selectively bring out more star detail.
@jsw0109 The Milky Way was certainly visible with the naked eye -- if I hadn't been fiddling around with the camera (both the viewfinder display and reviewing the shots for sharpness kills night vision) I suspect it would have been very clear, but even without that it was quite easy to spot.
If you do want to see it (even just by eye, rather than taking photos) two useful resources are the Dark Sky map, which shows where you might find good dark sky conditions locally (away from artificial light): http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/
And the clear sky chart for your area, which forecasts the weather conditions for the next 48 hours, with particular focus on cloud cover, atmospheric transparency, darkness (based on whether the moon is up or not), and ability to see fine detail: http://cleardarksky.com/csk/index.html#chart_list
Went to the Veolia Wildlife photographer exhibition at the Natural History museum in London last year... one of the shots was like this and yours is just as lovely and just as good! Glorious shot
Thank you also for the explanation of how you did this.
fav too!
The Sea to Sky highway runs at the foot of of the mountains, and has the Howe Sound immediately to the other side. In the event of an avalanche or landslide, the road could be closed for days or even weeks. The ferry terminal provides the ability to bypass such a closure by linking either to Squamish, to the north, or Horseshoe Cove, to the south.
Without this provision, communities such as Squamish and Whistler would lose easy access to the lower mainland in the event of a closure. As an example, Squamish is about an 65km/1 hour drive from downtown Vancouver. The fastest alternative route by paved road, should the Sea to Sky highway be closed, is 512km/7 hours.
As this happens so rarely, the dock is open to the public and provides various viewing platforms, one of which this photo was taken from.
@jsw0109 There is still quite a lot of ambient light even here, and relatively speaking, the night wasn't particularly ideal for viewing the Milky Way (atmospheric transparency not being as high as it can be). Therefore some processing was required to bring out the Milky Way to this degree.
This primarily consisted of careful application of curves layers to darken the overall glow in the sky and brighten the stars, as well as colour temperature adjustments to keep the sky blue while not turning the foreground structures totally orange (as they are lit only by distant sodium lamps).
Use of the clarity adjustment brush in Adobe Camera Raw was also used to selectively bring out more star detail.
If you do want to see it (even just by eye, rather than taking photos) two useful resources are the Dark Sky map, which shows where you might find good dark sky conditions locally (away from artificial light):
http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/
And the clear sky chart for your area, which forecasts the weather conditions for the next 48 hours, with particular focus on cloud cover, atmospheric transparency, darkness (based on whether the moon is up or not), and ability to see fine detail:
http://cleardarksky.com/csk/index.html#chart_list