Perseid Constellations
billanders
Registered Users Posts: 15 Big grins
Hey everyone,
Hopefully you had a chance to watch some of the Perseids this past weekend. Unfortunately, the peak was on "school nights", so that really put a crimp in the watching.
Monday night I decided to put the camera on the deck, connect the remote trigger, leave the camera in continuous, and let it run until the batteries died.
Here's a composite of the 552 images, which gave me the star trails. The frame with the bright meteorite was captured just 15 minutes after I pressed the shutter and the static stars are the final frame, four hours after I pushed the shutter.
I tried several different routes to get the finished image. The regular star trails composite was just a mess and single photos were nice (they include the Milky Way), but they were boring, save for the only visible meteorite. There were seven or so other meteorites, but those were very faint on the single image, not visible at all on the composites.
Outside of the composite and layering of the two finite points in time, the only other PS wizardry was making a copy of the image, then taking that copy over to LAB to color correct the sky.
Exif: 5dII, EF 28/1.8, ISO 800, 25"@f4
C&C appreciated.
Hopefully you had a chance to watch some of the Perseids this past weekend. Unfortunately, the peak was on "school nights", so that really put a crimp in the watching.
Monday night I decided to put the camera on the deck, connect the remote trigger, leave the camera in continuous, and let it run until the batteries died.
Here's a composite of the 552 images, which gave me the star trails. The frame with the bright meteorite was captured just 15 minutes after I pressed the shutter and the static stars are the final frame, four hours after I pushed the shutter.
I tried several different routes to get the finished image. The regular star trails composite was just a mess and single photos were nice (they include the Milky Way), but they were boring, save for the only visible meteorite. There were seven or so other meteorites, but those were very faint on the single image, not visible at all on the composites.
Outside of the composite and layering of the two finite points in time, the only other PS wizardry was making a copy of the image, then taking that copy over to LAB to color correct the sky.
Exif: 5dII, EF 28/1.8, ISO 800, 25"@f4
C&C appreciated.
0
Comments
The biggest fireball I saw the night I shot, with a persistent trail and all, was while I was setting up my camera, before I started shooting. I wish I had set up one of my cameras in portrait mode too.
How do you use LAB to color correct the sky? Do you get much light pollution from Ashford and Medford?
I like punctuated startrails, but I don't think it works here (for me at least) for 2 reason.
1) it takes away attention from the meteor
2) the constellations are 3.75 hours rotated away from the meteor orientation.
For the meteors, I'd have cranked up the ISO higher. I don't crank up the ISO for startrails in general (makes me kind of the odd one out), because I prefer to see more dark sky between more clearly defined trails, but I think it would've helped for the dimmer meteors.
Kolibri, thank you for the comments and thoughts.
The portrait orientation was more a function of the space between the trees. Landscape would have given me more trees, less sky. I still would have caught the bright trail, but missed out on a lot of the very faint traces in the upper parts of these frames.
We do get a fair bit of light pollution from Medford, but not so much that the Milky Way wasn't visible in the early individual frames of this sequence. And we have some bright street lights out in front of the house, so we have to sit just right on the deck to enjoy the night sky.
As far as LAB, I used it to color correct the sky. I forgot to manually set the white balance to before shooting, so the AWB colors were wonky. During post, I changed the temperature values to be consistent, but that left everything too blue.
So once I had all of the layers in PS, I made a flat copy of the whole stack, then opened that copy in a new window. I then changed the mode of that image to LAB, then used the curves to remove the color cast. Once that was done, I flattened the layers in the LAB image, copied it, then added it back as a new layer on the original image with a the layer mode changed to "Color". That way the color corrections were brought over, but I still had access to all of the layers that I had worked on prior.
And you aren't the odd one out. I do like the darker sky, so I tend towards the lower ISO. But I do agree with cranking it up for in this case.
I'm still experimenting and having fun with it. And I'll take your input to heart. Thank you!
http://billandersphoto.com
Thanks Ian!
http://billandersphoto.com