Enhanced Resolution

Orion over Mt Whitney

I took this photo a couple years ago (it’s got a lot more snow this year). In the middle distance is the top of Mt Whitney. I was camped in the Lone Pine (California) Campground. This is a 15 second exposure at ISO 3200 taken with my Nikon D810. Below the three stars of Orion’s Belt, the bright star is Rigel. Just above Orion, the yellowish star is Betelgeuse. To the right the bright star is Aldebaran. The small group farther right is the Pleiades.

What’s new with this photo is that I used Lightroom’s new AI noise reduction to minimize the noise associated with the higher ISO and longer exposure. Below see the before and after image … zoomed in 300% so you can see the difference easier. (At 300%, you also see a little of star motion.) You see a lot of the color dots are gone … that was mostly noise. Unfortunately, a few were likely very faint stars. But mostly, I wanted to do a little show-and-tell. You can see it is smoother. Some images will benefit from this new feature more than others. Sorry, but you can’t use it on a JPG image (yet) …

Detail of the Aldebaran area: Before
Detail of the Aldebaran area: After

Extra Super Duper Moon

Extra Super Duper Moon

The astronomy calendar I subscribe to called it an extra super duper moon, so I’m passing it on. This was the full moon on July 13th and it was the largest (closest to earth) of 2022. The cliff in the foreground is the north end of Marrowstone Island … part of Fort Flagler State Park. The color is approximately correct … it was very impressive.

It was 10 PM and fairly dark by the time the moon rose. I had been skeptical on my way to Fort Worden and a cliffside spot I knew would provide a good view to the Southeast where the moon would rise. Indeed, I could not capture the moon’s details without leaving the foreground completely in shadow. So, I did what I could and dealt with what I had. I thought that a high dynamic range (HDR) photo technique of combining several images wouldn’t work well in this case with a 500mm lens … the motion of the moon was quite evident between shots.

Moonset

Moonset

These are more shots from when I lived in Olympia and had an apartment with a west facing deck.

Setting Crescent Moon

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: