Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Star trails at Ice Lakes Basin

Back in July, I spent a night up at Ice Lakes Basin in the San Juan mountains and I created the below star trails image
From here to eternity
From here to eternity. Ice Lakes Basin, San Juan Mountains.
composite of 360 images, Nikon D600, Tokina 16-28mm f/2.8 at f/5.6, 15 s, ISO 1600

The individual images were shot 15 seconds exposure and with a 1 second delay between each other. Then I composited all the frames in Photoshop in lighten blend mode and removed hot pixels and airplane traces from individual frames. I also created the below video from these frames. On youtube you can see this in full 4k resolution.
An interesting backstory here is that I had planned to get the milky way rising over the mountain in the middle but had not checked my astronomy app careful enough as it turned out to be a nearly full moon night! A little bit of moonlight is OK but this was too much to see the milky way. It did nicely light up the entire valley though.

1 comment:

  1. interesting flare in left side of the sky ... colour looks like a comet in some ways (which would not be flare if that were the case).

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