The Milky Way shines over the mountains in Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington.
This was taken on the same trip as my photograph from the 8th January, but looking in the opposite direction. Again, my tracks across the frozen and snow-covered Picture Lake can be seen in the foreground.
This is an eleven photo panorama covering a very wide field of view, approximately 220 degrees horizontally by 120 degrees vertically. This has required some minor distortion to be displayed on a flat screen, hence the slightly curved trees at each side. Again this was using my 16-35mm lens, this time at f/3.2, ISO 6400, with 30 second exposures. Because of the dark frame noise reduction, capturing all the images for this panorama took around 12 minutes.
Clouds were starting to come in from the west, which really emphasised the glow from the city lights of Abbotsford in BC and beyond in this direction, reflecting their orange glow.
The landscape is primarily lit by the starlight, but the glow of the exterior lights of the Mount Baker Ski Area is visible on the mountain slopes and at the far right of the photograph.
Significant stars and constellations visible include the Big Dipper (most of it), Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Vega, Deneb, Mirach, as well as the Double Cluster (central, near the top, containing around 600 stars), several galaxies (including the smudge just to the left of the middle of the image which is the Andromeda Galaxy, estimated to contain over one trillion stars), and a meteor trail.
I'm a British software developer and photographer living in Vancouver, BC. I mainly photograph landscapes, cityscapes, night scenes, and water.
If you're interested in any...
you know... these are just so spectacularly unreal! i can't even begin to wrap my head around the planning and logistics and work that go into this type of image... nevermind the effort it must take to find the right vantage point and get out there at the right time and when the weather and sky were cooperating... and the result is just so purely glorious... fav :)
I don't think I'll ever understand how you capture skies like that...the part in the middle... I've never seen anything like that in the sky, even when I go far, far away from city and even small town lights. Was that actually visible to the naked eye, or is it revealed by the long exposures? I'm trying to wrap my brain around it :) I love these shots
@jsw0109 I've only seen the skies look like that to the naked eye at night on the side of the volcano on the Big Island in Hawaii. It is an overwhelming site!
@jsw0109 Thank you! The simple answer to your question is 'sort of'!
The problem is that, at these light levels, certain differences between how the eye works and how the camera works start to become more apparent.
The eye is extremely good at resolving detail in the very centre of its field of view, but not so good at resolving detail outside that. You can see this by staring at a word on the page while trying to work out what the next couple of words are -- it's almost impossible to do so. The brain is very adept at flicking our eyes all over the place and building up a coherent detailed image without us being aware of it.
However, the detailed, central area of the eye is not particularly sensitive to light -- the peripheral vision is far more light-sensitive. The problem when looking at night skies is that we can see that there are stars in our peripheral vision, but when we go to look at them in detail, they disappear (or appear to become dimmer)! This is why objects like the Pleiades look brighter if you don't look directly at them.
The camera, however, when set up like this, is able to combine the detail of the central part of the eye with the light sensitivity of the periphery, to produce an image which is both bright and detailed.
So quantitatively, no, the eye cannot see this level of detail -- this can be fairly conclusively determined from the full-resolution version of my previous image, where it's very easy to conservatively identify more than 35 stars in the Pleiades, where the average person will see between 6 and 9 unaided.
However, you absolutely do still get a very strong sense of the image you see here. It's certainly not the case that you are pointing the camera randomly around trying to find where the Milky Way is -- it's very clearly visible to the eye. But the level of detail and brightness is not so clear as with the camera.
Of course, it is important to develop good night adaptation if you want to get the best view with the eye. Most people don't wait long enough for this -- it takes at least 30 minutes in totally dark conditions for your eyes to adapt. Working with a camera will do nothing for your adaptation -- the readout at the bottom of the viewfinder is so bright it makes you squint, and when the display comes on at the end of a shot, it seems to light up an area about 20 feet across.
So overall, no, you don't see the detail that you can make out in this photo. But the overall experience of being somewhere like this is still, in my opinion, more impressive than any photo can convey (at least any photo I've taken!)
Magical shot. I admire your patience and the detail. The relatively long exposure would help with the stars too? Have you done any recent "star trail" views, 20 minutes or more?
@frankhymus Thank you! Not as much as you might think actually -- as the earth rotates, the stars move across the sensor, so a longer exposure doesn't actually make the stars brighter, it just makes them streakier. Obviously you need a long enough exposure that the stars illuminate at least one pixel on the sensor as much as possible, but after that, your shutter speed controls the stationary foreground brightness rather than the brightness of the stars themselves.
If you set the camera up on an equatorial mount to track the stars, then absolutely, the longer the exposure, the more brightness and detail you pick up (at the cost of blurring any foreground detail).
I'm not a big fan of star trail photos so I don't take them very often, but I do have one from this night that I'm quite pleased with, which I may upload in a couple of days :)
I have to Ditto Jake's comment! he took the words right out of my mouth! Your knowledge is awesome but your capability to share it is just beyond Generous! Thank you, another Fav +,, :)
The problem is that, at these light levels, certain differences between how the eye works and how the camera works start to become more apparent.
The eye is extremely good at resolving detail in the very centre of its field of view, but not so good at resolving detail outside that. You can see this by staring at a word on the page while trying to work out what the next couple of words are -- it's almost impossible to do so. The brain is very adept at flicking our eyes all over the place and building up a coherent detailed image without us being aware of it.
However, the detailed, central area of the eye is not particularly sensitive to light -- the peripheral vision is far more light-sensitive. The problem when looking at night skies is that we can see that there are stars in our peripheral vision, but when we go to look at them in detail, they disappear (or appear to become dimmer)! This is why objects like the Pleiades look brighter if you don't look directly at them.
The camera, however, when set up like this, is able to combine the detail of the central part of the eye with the light sensitivity of the periphery, to produce an image which is both bright and detailed.
So quantitatively, no, the eye cannot see this level of detail -- this can be fairly conclusively determined from the full-resolution version of my previous image, where it's very easy to conservatively identify more than 35 stars in the Pleiades, where the average person will see between 6 and 9 unaided.
However, you absolutely do still get a very strong sense of the image you see here. It's certainly not the case that you are pointing the camera randomly around trying to find where the Milky Way is -- it's very clearly visible to the eye. But the level of detail and brightness is not so clear as with the camera.
Of course, it is important to develop good night adaptation if you want to get the best view with the eye. Most people don't wait long enough for this -- it takes at least 30 minutes in totally dark conditions for your eyes to adapt. Working with a camera will do nothing for your adaptation -- the readout at the bottom of the viewfinder is so bright it makes you squint, and when the display comes on at the end of a shot, it seems to light up an area about 20 feet across.
So overall, no, you don't see the detail that you can make out in this photo. But the overall experience of being somewhere like this is still, in my opinion, more impressive than any photo can convey (at least any photo I've taken!)
If you set the camera up on an equatorial mount to track the stars, then absolutely, the longer the exposure, the more brightness and detail you pick up (at the cost of blurring any foreground detail).
I'm not a big fan of star trail photos so I don't take them very often, but I do have one from this night that I'm quite pleased with, which I may upload in a couple of days :)