Orion from Northumberland

[Kevstew]

Constellation Orion from the Breamish Valley, inside Northumberland’s dark sky park. Composite of 2 images, one for the foreground with the tracking turned off and one for the stars with the tracking on. Equipment used,  ioptron skytracker, canon1100d and sigma 10-20mm Lens @10mm.  Processed with gimp2.8

thanks for looking 

[MarsG76]

Fantastic looking image.... good work.

 

 

[Kevstew]

2 minutes ago, MarsG76 said:

Fantastic looking image.... good work.

 

 

Thank you 

[M Astronomy]

Incredible image. Barnard's loop is showing nicely. How do you go about editing composites? I only have gimp, would it be possible to do without Photoshop or other programs?

[Demonperformer]

That is a very nice composite, Kev.

[scarp15]

Terrific image, you have captured the sense of place and atmospheric nightscape of the valley. As mentioned quite astonishing regarding Barnard's Loop, Breamish valley is great place to go hill walking and stargazing. 

[Kevstew]

2 hours ago, scarp15 said:

Terrific image, you have captured the sense of place and atmospheric nightscape of the valley. As mentioned quite astonishing regarding Barnard's Loop, Breamish valley is great place to go hill walking and stargazing. 

Thanks. Your right it’s a great place Day or night 

[Kevstew]

10 hours ago, Demonperformer said:

That is a very nice composite, Kev.

Thank you 

[Kevstew]

10 hours ago, M Astronomy said:

Incredible image. Barnard's loop is showing nicely. How do you go about editing composites? I only have gimp, would it be possible to do without Photoshop or other programs?

Thank you. I don’t have photoshop either. I only used gimp and done a few tweaks on my phone. There are a few ways to do this, but roughly on this picture what I done was, open both images as layers. Set the sky image opacity as darken only, then paint the hills and river white on the sky layer so they don’t show through. Then flatten the image. 

[Pete Presland]

That's a superb end result, lovely dark skies. How long were the exposures for the sky?

[Kevstew]

13 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

That's a superb end result, lovely dark skies. How long were the exposures for the sky?

Thanks. Single exposure of 6mins, 1600iso @f6.3 I was trying a higher f ratio to try and get better star shapes. The ground was 9 minutes and possibly f4 if I remember correctly. 

[Beulah]

WOW!!!! That is an amazing image. Looks like you've been getting more clear nights than us chumps in the West.

Do you mind telling us how you blended the two images? I'm hapelessly having a go at this nighttime stuff and although the images are OK, I am having a hard time blending the images without it looking too processed. Thank in in advance for any pointers.  

[Kevstew]

11 hours ago, Beulah said:

WOW!!!! That is an amazing image. Looks like you've been getting more clear nights than us chumps in the West.

Do you mind telling us how you blended the two images? I'm hapelessly having a go at this nighttime stuff and although the images are OK, I am having a hard time blending the images without it looking too processed. Thank in in advance for any pointers.  

Thanks. I will try and explain how I processed this. Open both pictures as layers in whatever software your using, with the tracked image on top. Set the tracked image as darken only. Using lasso draw around the ground to select it, then using levels move the middle arrow to the left. You should see the background layer come through. Select the align tool, to fine tune the alignment, then crop and flatten the image. Hopefully that will make some sense 

[Beulah]

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.

 

[Kevstew]

17 minutes ago, Beulah said:

Thank you for taking the time to explain this.

 

Not a problem ?

[davew]

That's very good of you to illustrate what you did so well. Cheers.

I've never used Gimp but even I could understand it !

Dave.