[interested_observer]

Evening Everyone,

I'll start off by apologizing for the wall of words. I had Friday off, so I got up at O'h Dark Hundred (~1.45am) with about 3 hours of sleep and drove an hour away to the Lost Dutchman State Park - to shoot the Milky Way rising over Superstition Mountain. I had done this before and wanted to correct some problems in the image. I had everything figured out - the angles, times - moon down, MW rising. I had a plan. I wanted to shoot panels for panoramas - 7 to 10 frames wide (portrait), 2 rows (one for the landscape and one for the stars) then composite them together - both with and without GPS. I was also shooting with a Pano Head (Nodal Ninja 3 that I have had forever).

I burned through 150 frames all total So, here is what I shot... Everything at 18mm with a Sigma 18-35 on a K5IIs

• Some test frames checking out framing and alignment along with levelness across 150 degrees in width.
• Horiz pano - Landscape at 30 seconds f1.8 at ISO 3200 - no GPS
• Horiz pano - Landscape at 30 seconds f1.8 at ISO 1600 - no GPS
• Horiz pano - Landscape at 30 seconds f1.8 at ISO 400 - 2 sets - no GPS
• Horiz pano - Sky at 10 seconds, f1.8 at ISO 1600 - 3 sets for possible stacking- no GPS
• Horiz pano - Sky at 10 seconds f1.8 at ISO 3200 - a just in case backup set. - no GPS
• Horiz pano - Sky at 60 seconds, f1.8 at ISO 1600 with GPS tracking
• Vert pano - Landscape at 30 seconds, f1.8 at ISO 400 - no GPS
• Vert pano - Sky at 10 seconds, f1.8 at ISO 1600 - 8 sets for possible stacking - no GPS
• Vert pano - Sky at 60 seconds, f1.8 at ISO 1600 - with GPS
• Horiz pano - different location with a change in landscape that turned out to be just as Astro Twilight so it really did not turn out

So here is the good, bad and the ugly results (in words - as I am still trying to process all of this)

• Good - I had been trying out focusing with a long throw LED flashlight. I gave up on this, and focused the night before (at sunset) on a ridge 10 miles away. 2" wide Gaffers Tape does the trick. Focus was perfect. The LED flashlight is great for finding the right location to setup.
• Good - the landscape element turned out at ISO 400 to be just fine. ICE stitches just fine as always.
• Good - shooting the stars with a 10 second shutter (no GPS tracking) (rule of 200 rather than 500) produces solid pin point stars. Essentially no trailing. I am very happy with this.
• Good/Bad - shooting the stars with a 60 second shutter (with GPS tracking enabled) produces no star trails on the edges - this is very good. I am very happy with this. On the down side, when I zoom in on the image (pixel peeping) to check the stars for trailing, I find ever so slight trailing on the right side, while I am getting donuts on the left hand side of the image. A de-centered lens element? It can't be a de-centered element, since the lens shoots just fine without GPS. So, it is a slight artifact of the GPS astrotracking.
• UGLY - The initial quick stitches using ICE - the star row stitches were not what I really expected. For complex stitching, especially with night shots, ICE is less than what I was expecting. It has been doing ok up to now, but now I think that I am just pushing the envelope. I shot with 15 degree shifts in the pano head so I had about 2/3 overlap. ICE did not like this at all and came up with a lot of weird stitching. Setting ICE up by hand helped a lot with the weirdness and corrected a number of things it was doing. Overall, things work better with really no more than 50% overlap (~20 degree shifts per frame).
• UGLY - my post processing skills and abilities along with my tools. I am thinking of going to PhotoShop so that I can post process everything together with the raw images. I should just stop thinking about it and just go buy it,
• Neither Good nor Bad - Lightroom - my post processing skills suck. Using PhotoShop will probably not help with this, but I need to start to remove the variations I am seeing from going from lightroom to Ice then back to lightroom, then to mask and composite. At least with PS, it will do everything and offer some control, while not moving from format to format.
• Bad - My copy DeepSkyStacker will no longer run. I gotta figure this one out. I still have not been able to get this running yet. Just going to down load it again and start all over

________________

I forgot a few items....

• Wide pano stitching - at night, with the though of manually compositing everything together is a tough nut to crack. Capturing enough images both with and without the GPS tracking was a good call. Adding the GPS tracking in just pushes the bridge a bit too far out.
• On the other hand, I took the landscape set of images perfectly level, so I have lots of landscape and just a little sky, forcing me into stitching with 2 rows. I think setting everything up for just a single row would have been a better option - which I did not consider at the time. I would have had only one set of stitches to push through.
• Rather than going the route of masking off then overlaying sets of images, PhotoShop has something close to a one step process. This should help.
• Going with ISO 1600 as the maximum, I think is a good choice. There is a long discussion on this up on the Astronomy Group. It is based on solid science in terms of the Sony sensor.

• https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/groups/135-astrophotography/4340-how-avoi...high-isos.html

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Last edited by interested_observer; 04-22-2016 at 05:12 PM.

[jimr-pdx]

You forgot one more item - the pictures
Please share a few!

[interested_observer]

You forgot one more item - the pictures
Please share a few!

Hi Jim, Here is one of the last ones I took, right at Astro Twilight at 5.30 am. It was really the only single row pano, so I did not composite. The original size is 12400 x 5800. I took two sets - one at ISO 3200 (this one) and one at ISO 1600. I post processed the middle - with the mountain, then pasted all the adjustments to the individual frames, then stitched them together, then made some additional slight adjustments. The colors are not right, but I am still figuring out just what to do.

The sun was still under the horizon, but the twilight was just starting to spill over the horizon. Off to the extreme right, is the lights from Apache Junction. This is a "gate" to get through the fence. I was about a quarter of a mile on the other side for all of the other images. The fence and gate does add some interest. Also, on the other sets, the Milky Way was in the process of coming up behind the mountain and then climbing in the sky. This was just the last set before heading back to the truck.

Oh yea, even at 5.30 - it was still pretty much pitch black out with just the hint of the sun rise - along with the light pollution from AJ.

The moral of the story here - is KISS - keep it simple for the stupid one behind the camera...... A single row for everything at night from here on out!
_______________________

Here is another one - a vertical stitch. It's 4800 x 4500. Rather than a composite it is just a stitch, so the landscape was blended across a very stunning image (at 400) and a crappy one at 1600. Not really happy with this one yet. Still figuring out the post processing. Also, even reducing the size, I had to reduce the image quality to 20% so that it would load and post here.