I ended the night with a parting shot of the Pleiades and the winter stars rising behind the Tower of Babel formation. The final movies and stills are in a music video here: Still images shot, I began a time-lapse of the Lights, grabbing another 450 frames, this time using just 2-second exposures at f/1.6 for a rapid cadence time-lapse to help freeze the motion of the curtains. This is a 2-second exposure at f/2 with the Sigma 20mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 5000. This is one frame from a 450-frame time-lapse with the aurora at its best. The Northern Lights in a fine Level 4 to 5 display over Desolation Valley at Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, on the night of August 31/Sept 1. The lead-image panorama is the first result, showing the sweeping arc of Northern Lights over Desolation Valley. (I was lazy and hadn’t hefted a second camera and tripod up the steep hill to the viewpoint.) With 450 frames shot, I stopped the Milky Way time-lapse and turned the camera the other way. An aurora was getting active in the opposite direction, to the north. (There are programs that attempt to align and stack the moving sky but I’ve never found they work well.)Ībout midnight, the Valley of Ten Peaks around the lake began to light up. The camera wasn’t tracking the sky, so stacking sky images isn’t feasible, as much as I might like to have the lower noise there, too. The frames are part of a 450-frame time-lapse.Īs the caption explains, the still is a composite of one exposure for the sky and 16 in succession for the ground, averaged together in a technique to smooth noise. This is a stack of 16 images for the ground, mean combined to smooth noise, and one exposure for the sky, untracked, all 15 seconds at f/2 with the Sigma 20mm Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 6400. This is looking southwest with the images taken about 11:15 pm on August 31, 2016.The ground is illuminated by a mix of starlight, lights from the Moraine Lake Lodge, and from a display of aurora brightening behind the camera to the north. The starclouds of Scutum and Sagittarius are just above the peaks of the Valley of Ten Peaks. From those I would extract select frames to create a still image. I planned to shoot 600 frames for a time-lapse. as the sky still had some twilight blue in it. The handy planning app, The Photographer’s Ephemeris, showed me (as below) that the Milky Way and galactic centre (the large circles) would be ideally placed over the end of the lake as astronomical twilight ended at 10:30 p.m. The goal was to shoot a time-lapse and stills of the Milky Way over the lake. On August 31 I took advantage of a rare clear night in the forecast and headed to Banff and Moraine Lake for a night of shooting. What a night this was – perfect skies over an iconic location in the Rockies.
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