A wonderful treat to see the auroras down this far south (Olympic Peninsula, WA). We drove out to North Beach (just west of Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend) which has a view to the north (duh) getting there about 10 PM and staying for 2 hours. The colors were not nearly so vibrant until you did a 2 second time exposure. Some folks were using their cellphones as ‘viewers’ … which worked well. These were taken with my Nikon D-850 and Zeiss 21mm f/2.8 lens. I shot at ISO 3200 and f/5 or so.
Aurora 2 (looking almost directly overhead)Aurora 3 (looking northeast)Aurora 4 (looking west)Aurora 5 (looking northwest)Aurora 6 (moon setting and reflecting on Strait of Juan de Fuca)Aurora 7 (looking north northwest)
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: BeforeDetail of the Aldebaran area: After
The John Day area of Eastern Oregon has very dark skies with minimal light pollution. The star gazing is spectacular. I was down camping out a year or two back and took some time exposure shots with a Zeiss 21mm lens. I really liked the images at the time, but I recently revisited them and realized that I had not developed their full potential in Lightroom by removing as much noise as possible. I really liked the improvement, so here’s the resulting image.
