[merged] Beautiful Images of the Milky Way

[Anomalocaris 1,687]

The Milky Way Over Yellowstone is Impossibly Beautiful

[MasterFlint 59]

It's fake as h**l

Lane photographed the Abyss Pool in Yellowstone National Park just after a storm had passed the area — you can catch the hint of a flash of lightning between the trees in the center light. The image contains an astonishing example of airglow, the faint emission of light in a planetary atmosphere that prevents the night sky from ever being completely dark. When first posting the photograph to his Facebook page, Lane explained that instead of dropping airglow saturation by 10% like he usually does, he emphasized it by 10% in a gentle tweak on this stunning image. He spent 4 months colour-correcting the night time images to match them to the natural colours seen in the daytime at Yellowstone National Park.

[Crabby Kitten 1,828]

That is really beautiful. Is it touched up though?

[MasterFlint 59]

That is really beautiful. Is it touched up though?

Yes it's fake. Read my comment above, I quoted the articles own words about him altering the image. To me a "gentle tweak" doesn't take 4 months lmao!

[toast 17,421]

Yes it's fake.

Lane cleary described how he maintained the raw images, so the images do not fulfill the criteria of a "fake".

Calm down.

[Waspie_Dwarf 16,480]

Lane cleary described how he maintained the raw images, so the images do not fulfill the criteria of a "fake".

Calm down.

You took the words out of my mouth toast.

The image of the milky way is genuine.

The image of Yellowstone is genuine (albeit with some colour processing).

The result is a composite of two genuine images.

It would be impossible to take a single image that looks like that. The image of the milky way requires a very long exposure time (quite possibly hours). That presents a problem as, over hours, the stars change position in the sky quite considerably. If you simply mounted a camera on a fixed tripod then the stars would appear as curved trails not points of light and the milky way would be blurred beyond all recognition.

The trailing problem can be solved by using a tracking mount. This moves the camera at the rate of one complete revolution in 24 hours. The camera moves at the same rate as the sky and so pin sharp images of the stars are obtained. However this introduces a new problem, because the camera is moving any stationary objects (Yellowstone National Park for example) will now be blurred beyond recognition.

The ONLY way to make an image like that is to make a composite.

What Dave Lane has done is produce an image of staggering beauty. He has combined science and art magnificently. He has used processing techniques to faithfully reproduce what was actually present.

What he has NOT done is produce a fake.

[toast 17,421]

It would be impossible to take a single image that looks like that. The image of the milky way requires a very

long exposure time (quite possibly hours). That presents a problem as, over hours, the stars change position

in the sky quite considerably. If you simply mounted a camera on a fixed tripod then the stars would appear

as curved trails not points of light and the milky way would be blurred beyond all recognition.

A guided mount is the best option to make nice images with long time exposure rates but there are also nice

images possible with shorttime exposure rates, to keep the stars in a dot form, using stacking software. For those

who didnt heard about that system/procedure, here is a very good vid made by a guy named Forrest Tanaka,

explaining how to make a good deep sky image out of a series of short time exposure shots shot with a DSLR

on a tripod and using free stacking software (vid is 24 minutes but informative):

Edited July 31, 2015 by toast

[Anomalocaris 1,687]

Milky Way with Airglow Australis

After sunset on September 1, an exceptionally intense, reddish airglow flooded this Chilean winter night skyscape. Above a sea of clouds and flanking the celestial Milky Way, the airglow seems to ripple and flow across the northern horizon in atmospheric waves.

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Edited September 5, 2015 by Anomalocaris

[Anomalocaris 1,687]

Marine Life Milkyway

A photobombing Harbor Seal basking under the dark skies of Acadia National Park.

Source

Moments in time - A behind the scenes night sky time-lapse

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Edited September 7, 2015 by Anomalocaris

[Anomalocaris 1,687]

With 46 billion pixels, this is the largest ever image of space

The image of the Milky Way, which is made up of photos of 268 individual sections, contains 46 billion pixels.

It's so massive — the file is 194 gigabytes — that researchers at Ruhr University Bochum had to build a special online tool to allow viewers to scroll through the entire thing.

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