Winter Hexagon - Akira Fuji Style

[Space Ranger]

The attached image shows the bright winter stars that form the Winter Hexagon. It was captured from a dark location in Caithness in northern Scotland on a particularly chilly night (-12 deg C), but the view of the star filled sky made it well worth braving the cold. This single long exposure was taken with a soft focus filter over the camera lens in the style of astrophotographer Akira Fuji. I like how the filter makes the brighter stars more prominent, helping the constellation shapes & star colours become more distinct.

The image is a single shot captured using a static tripod, DSLR and wide angle lens (astromodded Canon 600D, 16mm FL, f3.5, ISO6400, 30s). Processing was done in Adobe Lightroom 6 & Paintshop Pro.

Hope you like it :)

[maw lod qan]

That is an incredible sky!

[Space Ranger]

The skies are pretty dark at this location - typically bottle 2 & ~21.8 SQM reading. This amounts to an amazing number of stars being visible when clouds permit.

As a consequence the minor image processing done was to brighten the foreground and darken the sky a bit😁

This was to reduce the effect of all the faint stars and thus make the hexagon more obvious.

[Scooot]

It’s a wonderful image. 
“As a consequence the minor image processing done was to brighten the foreground and darken the sky a bit”  That’s funny 😄 I’m very envious.