Amazing Sky by Alan Dyer

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Panorama of the Winter Sky.jpg

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A mosaic panorama of the northern winter sky and constellations, taken February 27, 2016 from home in southern Alberta. Orion is near centre, with the array of winter constellations and stars around it. The Pleiades is at right of centre, the Beehive cluster at upper left. Sirius is at lower left. Auriga and Gemini are at top, Taurus at right of centre.

This is a mosaic of 5 wide by 4 tall panels, each taken with the 35mm lens at f/2 and for 25 seconds, with the filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 3200. The pan extends over about 120° and is about 70° tall. All exposures untracked.

I used the iOptron iPano motorized panning unit to move the camera automatically from area to area in the sky, taking 20 segments in total at 40% overlap. I processed the originals RAWs in Adobe Camera Raw, then exported those to TIFFs to import into PTGui stitching software. I used its Equirectanguler projection to stitch the pan segments for the squarist (!) image format. I brought this into Photoshop to then use its Adaptive Wide Angle filter to warp the image to an even more rectangular format with a straight horizon. Photoshop itself and ACR’s new Photomerge function did not produce good results in stitching, producing either a wildly distorted image, or in the case of ACR, producing a nicely formatted image but with dark stitching artifacts at seams.

The final image was processed in Photoshop with the usual adjustment layers and smart filters and is 11,000 by 6,700 pixels.
Copyright
© 2016 Alan Dyer
Image Size
10000x6057 / 38.5MB
Contained in galleries
The Milky Way, Various Constellations
A mosaic panorama of the northern winter sky and constellations, taken February 27, 2016 from home in southern Alberta. Orion is near centre, with the array of winter constellations and stars around it. The Pleiades is at right of centre, the Beehive cluster at upper left. Sirius is at lower left. Auriga and Gemini are at top, Taurus at right of centre.<br /> <br /> This is a mosaic of 5 wide by 4 tall panels, each taken with the 35mm lens at f/2 and for 25 seconds, with the filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 3200. The pan extends over about 120° and is about 70° tall. All exposures untracked. <br /> <br /> I used the iOptron iPano motorized panning unit to move the camera automatically from area to area in the sky, taking 20 segments in total at 40% overlap. I processed the originals RAWs in Adobe Camera Raw, then exported those to TIFFs to import into PTGui stitching software. I used its Equirectanguler projection to stitch the pan segments for the squarist (!) image format. I brought this into Photoshop to then use its Adaptive Wide Angle filter to warp the image to an even more rectangular format with a straight horizon. Photoshop itself and ACR’s new Photomerge function did not produce good results in stitching, producing either a wildly distorted image, or in the case of ACR, producing a nicely formatted image but with dark stitching artifacts at seams. <br /> <br /> The final image was processed in Photoshop with the usual adjustment layers and smart filters and is 11,000 by 6,700 pixels.