FenlandPaul

Very kind - really appreciate that. Thanks so much Ger - really appreciated.

Thanks very much for watching, Jim, and for your kind comments.

Thanks Ian. I agree re the light pollution, which is just as well as it’s rather unavoidable round here! Yes I’ve played with the hue and saturation in post, as well as applying a slight spin blur. Definitely art rather than scientific accuracy in what I do! There are plenty of other people producing beautifully accurate star colour shots, so I’m trying to be a bit different in this, whilst generally getting the message out to the wider world that not all stars are white!

Very kind of you. It was really enjoyable to make. Thank you. It’s nice to have a foreground like that which isn’t hours of driving away! Shame about the local light pollution, but it could be a lot worse.

In a field about 4 miles outside Cambridge is a treasure trove of astrophysical history. Giant iron skeletons tower above the hedges and ditches, interspersed with rows of wires strung between wooden posts, resembling a dormant vineyard. This is the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, at which in 1967 a young Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars using an instrument she helped to build. During one of the scarce clear nights in January, I visited with the intent of capturing three shots. I'd wanted to do an extended star trails image over the beautiful structure of the One Mile Telescope, a foreground that in my eyes never gets old. Additionally I'd planned two mosaics, one of the Cygnus Milky Way and one of the Orion region, both with the One Mile in the foreground. In the end I captured over 5 hours of star trails, and after painstakingly removing all the usual plane and satellite imperfections (and dealing with an accidental shift of camera position when I changed the battery), I got a shot that I'm super happy with - definitely the best star trail image I've created and I had a lot of fun with editing it. Unfortunately the two mosaics I captured proved almost completely unusable. Whilst they stitched (a miracle in itself given the haphazard way I shot them), the images suffered from horrible gradients and brightness differences that I've managed too get almost nowhere with, despite some very helpful suggestions from people over on the Image Processing part of this forum. I just couldn't get an image I was happy with - maybe some data to return to in the future, especially if I ever graduate beyond PhotoShop. I felt rather silly wasting a stunning 5 hour period by over complicating things; I should have gone for a shorter focal length and just captured more exposures, rather than going overly long (85mm) - it's not as if I was planning on printing the final image super large! So a few weeks later I returned to capture the Orion image at a much more sensible 35mm; sadly it was too late in the season to capture Cygnus as it was now well within the murk after sunset - one to save for next year (provided no work has started on the giant solar farm currently awaiting planning permission for the area!). As usual, I made a video journal of the night, which you can see below. I'd welcome any feedback and thoughts - clear skies! Paul ✨Spectral Vortex✨ 📷Canon 6D with Samyang 14mm f/2.8 lens 🔧902x 20s exposures at ISO640 and f/4 🎞️ Edited in StarStax, Lightroom and PhotoShop ✨Revealing the Unseen✨ 📷Canon 6D (astro-modified) with Samyang 35mm f/1.4 lens and SkyWatcher StarAdventurer tracker 🔧Foreground: 30s at ISO1250 f/4. Sky: 14x80s exposures at ISO800 and f/4, plus H-Alpha 5x180s exposures at ISO800 and f/2.8, p;us dark frames 🎞️ Edited and assembled in Sequator and PhotoShop

Lovely, hard-earned images Daniel! The wader-incident just adds to the story! Hope you get the Sigma sorted. 👍

I really appreciate that. I’ll have a look at that method later today (along with hopefully revisiting the location to try again with a wider lens). Definitely something to work with - massively thankful. The idea of learning another new application doesn’t fill me with excitement, so anything I can do in PS is a bonus!

Really glad you enjoyed it, Lee. Very excited to see your arch pano - wishing you clear skies for that!! Hope you’re still enjoying that Samyang 14mm!

Thanks Lee - I really appreciate that. It showed me how much faffing I usually do when I’m out!! 🤣

Taking nightscape images can be time-consuming. Most of us live under fairly mediocre skies so a drive of maybe a couple of hours to a darker location isn't uncommon, and once you've made that journey you may as well stay a while. Unless you happen to live atop a cliff or in an attractively derelict stone barn, you probably don't have the ideal foreground in your garden, so the comforts and advantages of deep sky imaging - sipping tea inside while the gear does all the work - often aren't open to you. But not everyone is able to spend hours away from home at night. Work, family, or even health concerns could mean we're limited in the time we can spend outside trying to capture usable images of the night sky. So what would happen, I wondered, if I only had an hour? An hour to leave the house, get to a decent location, capture a shot and get home. Could I capture a nightscape shot I was happy with and enjoy the experience as well? Back in January I had the perfect opportunity to give it a go. A crystal clear evening - like hens' teeth so far this year - coincided with a commitment I had later that night. So I had a crack at The 60 Minute Nightscape. And because I'm a little unhinged, I filmed a vlog of the attempt as well (hint: don't film a vlog if you want the evening to also be relaxing!). So here below is my final image and the video of its capture. It won't win any prizes, but in the circumstances I was reasonably happy, and when I posted it on my local village Facebook page it got quite the reaction. It turns out it is possible to take a nice image whilst only being away for an hour. For the avoidance of doubt, however, I don't plan to share that revelation with my wife…… Hope you enjoy…. 📷 Canon 6D (astro-modified) with Samyang 14mm f/2.8 lens on Skywatcher StarAdventurer tracker 🔧Sky - 13x60 second exposure at ISO 800 and f/4 + 1x300 second h-alpha exposure at ISO 800. Foreground - 1x20 second exposure at ISO 1600 🎞️ Stacked in Sequator. Edited and blended in PhotoShop and Starnet++

Another image that sparks a combination of admiration and envy! Very nicely done - I love the contrast between the airglow and the nebulosity. I hope you’ve got some big walls to have these images printed and hung onto!!

Now that’s a special image! Congratulations - definitely a keeper and a wonderful memory. It’s fantastic. 👌

Hi all I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction, or tell me to stop pursuing a lost cause! Recently I attempted a widefield nightscape mosaic at 85mm of the Orion region. I wanted to create something super detailed, but I've ended up with a bit of a monster and now wish I'd just gone with fewer panes and a wider lens. But the night has personal significance and if I'd love it if I could salvage something. I ended up with 18 panes in the mosaic, each of which was 3x120s exposures at ISO800 and f/4, using a modded Canon 6D. I also shot flat frames "just in case" - I hadn't really expected to need them at f/4 with the Samyang 85mm (widest aperture is f/1.4). Having stacked each pane in DSS, after a bit of persuasion in PTGui the whole thing stitched, which I was delighted about. But I seem to have lots of "micro-gradients" that resemble a vignette in each frame, despite taking flats. I've never seen this before, but also I've never attempted a mosaic of this complexity before. The underlying data seems reasonable (nice stars, good detail in the Rosette etc), so I'm after suggestions around how I can clean up these horrible gradients / vignettes (obviously I'm not concerned about the bright horizon). I use PhotoShop for editing, and have tried using AstroFlat Pro, but the result is fairly ugly. Any suggestions would be very gratefully received (as I say, even if the suggestion is "don't bother, Paul") - thank you in advance. I've copied below the lightly stretched output from PTGui, together with the image map from PTGui showing how the image stitched. Paul

Very nice, Paul. Top one for my taste - I think colour suits Orion because it’s got so much variety in it. Always love seeing your locations, which I look upon with more than a little envy!!

Fantastic detail in the Orion MW and that zodiacal light is super bright! Is that a selfie you’ve managed there too (left of the obsy)? Looks like a very special place.

Thanks John - appreciated. I should probably start adding the exposure details on the final images on my YT channel, but I’m not especially talented at the graphic overlays so it adds quite a bit of time at the moment. Hopefully that’ll change at some point!

Blown away by the detail!

Thanks Paul. I think I agree with you. I like the pop in the h-alpha images, but the boat has something about it. Ha ha - I think I would have needed to take several layers off!! Thanks Dave - appreciated. It was a very obliging owl!! Fantastic! It’s a lovely place to go to. Thanks for your comments - very kind. Thanks very much - very kind. Thanks Geof. The Starglow is a bit like a fog filter, and it applies a slight blur that makes the brighter stars pop and their colours come through a bit more. It’s similar to the effect from a sky with a thin layer of high citrus. It looks like a small pane of glass and I simply wave it in from of the lens when I take the images.

Thanks Mark - that's definitely my favourite too (and I've now got my answer to "what on earth's that?" nailed down!) Thank you Michael - appreciated.

Last week during the cold snap I headed to Wicken Fen nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, a wildlife haven comprising a few hundred acres of unspoilt fenland. It's a location I've shot from a few times before but I've never been wholly happy with the results. I had the place to myself and so the evening was spent in the company of owls, the distant shriek of muntjacs and the occasional unidentified shuffle from the reedbeds. It was a 50% moon, and its silvery glow sparkled on the droplets of frost that adorned the long wooden boardwalks and the fronds of the reeds that swayed gently in the breeze. It was bitterly cold, but I was well wrapped up and I could simply enjoy the night. My aim for the night was to capture some shots of Orion over the pretty old windpump - a feature of the Fen - and over one of the boardwalks that we'd scouted out earlier in the week. With a relatively unambitious plan, I was able to spend the time to get some higher quality sky shots using the tracker and to use the h-alpha filter to bring out some of the lovely nebulosity in that part of the sky. For those interested, I also made a video journal of the night, which you can find linked at the bottom. Overall it was a really enjoyable night and I'm pleased with the images I made. I wish I'd had the foresight to place myself in the scene in "Boardwalk to the Stars", to give it a human element; without that it seems possibly a little sterile. That said, I was dressed up like the Michelin Man, so it may not have been as effective as I'd have liked! Hope you enjoy, and always welcome feedback and suggestions. 😊 ✨Guarding the Fen✨ 📷 Canon 6D (astro-modified) with Sigma Art 24mm f/1.4 lens 🔧 Foreground: single 6s exposure at f/3.2 and ISO 3200. Sky: 29x60s tracked exposures at f/5 and ISO800 (plus dark frames) and 14x300s tracked H-Alpha exposures at f/2.8 and ISO800. 🎞️ Stacked in Sequator. Edited and blended in PhotoShop and Starnet++ ✨Paddle me to the Stars✨ 📷 Canon 6D with Samyang 24mm f/1.4 lens 🔧 Foreground: single 30s exposure at f/4 and ISO 800. Sky: single 15 exposure at f/2.8 and ISO1600 (with starglow filter) 🎞️ Edited and blended in PhotoShop ✨Boardwalk under the Stars✨ 📷 Canon 6D (astro-modified) with Sigma Art 24mm f/1.4 lens 🔧 Foreground: single 20s exposure at f/4 and ISO 1600. Sky: 29x60s tracked exposures at f/5 and ISO800 (plus dark frames) and 14x300s tracked H-Alpha exposures at f/2.8 and ISO800. 🎞️ Stacked in Sequator. Edited and blended in PhotoShop and Starnet++ ✨The Plough, the Lion and the Wind Pump✨ 📷 Canon 6D with Samyang 24mm f/1.4 lens 🔧 Foreground: single 6s exposure at f/2.8 and ISO 3200. Sky: single 6 exposure at f/2.8 and ISO3200 (with Starglow filter) 🎞️ Edited and blended in PhotoShop

Very nice - lots of interesting stuff to see in the sky there! Looks like your Rokinon 24mm is a better example than mine!

Wowsers, that is indeed bright! Amazing. I've only seen it obviously by eye once, from the far south west of Cornwall - it really popped on camera!

Beautiful image - you've really brought out the tranquility of the scene.

Very nice - superb to get a few instances of aurora visible at that latitude last year, especially through the moonlight. Roll on more in 2024!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading that, David - congratulations and thank you for penning such an inspiring narrative. Having been purely visual and manual for over 25 years, I recently started taking nightscape photographs and, latterly, tried my hand at deep sky imaging. I’ve struggled to get on with DSO imaging, and don’t feel the connection I used to have while hunting galaxies and nebulae with my 12” dobsonian. I have been thinking about going back to visual; your post has made that a little more likely!