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

Night Sky Revisited

Milky Way, John Day area

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.

  • Camera: Nikon Df
  • Lens: Zeiss 21mm Distagon T*
  • ISO 6400 15 sec f/4.5

Moonset over the Olympics

The new moon setting over the NE Olympic Mountains

This was October 29th, the moon at about 13.3%. I went out to the county airport to get a clear view to the SW and lucked out with the moon setting over the small patch of the Olympic Mountains visible from that location.

  • Camera: Nikon D-850 with 80-400mm lens set at 400mm.
  • ISO 1250 1/30th sec f/9.0

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