Early Morning at Lake Keystone
The view from my front porch.
This last Saturday morning I got my chance. It wasn't ideal, but it was good enough. The Moon was a few days shy of full, but was going to set a little after 4 AM. With the time change that gave me a bit over 2 hours before twilight. Being mid-March the core of the Milky Way would be rising about the time the Moon was setting.
I've talked before about the need for dark skies when doing astrophotography. How dark you need depends on what you are trying to do. We are only a few miles from Tulsa, and we certainly have plenty of light pollution, but there are still lots of possibilities in these conditions.
The Moon Setting over Lake Keystone
The Moon was still up, so I headed a few miles down the road to a small Corps of Engineers park named Cowskin Bay to get a photo of the moon setting over the lake.
Highway 412 Bridge and Keystone Dam
Highway 412 Bridge and Keystone Dam
If you look closely you can just make out the Milky Way rising over the bridge, but it's mostly lost in the light pollution.
The light trails from the traffic add a nice touch.
The Milky Way Rising in my Front Yard
This was going to be a challenging shot. There is a lot of light outside our trailer, and it was going to be difficult to get enough light to image the Milky Way without overexposing the lights in the yard. Fortunaly there are tools to help with this.
I took a total of six photos exposed to avoid overexposing the landscape. Then I loaded them into some free Windows software called Sequator. If you are going to do astrophotography, then you want Sequator. I told it which parts were sky and which were land, then set it to align the stars in the sky, to reduce light pollution, and automatically adjust light levels. Essentially it stacked all six photos, giving me an effective exposure of about 2 minutes for the sky, but only added enough of the landscape to reach the proper exposure. It also reduced noise in the photos to produce a much sharper image. By stacking photos and aligning the stars, Sequator lets you do much longer exposures using an ordinary tripod than you could without it. And it's Free.
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Thank you @penderis for this artwork!
Thank you @enginewitty for this artwork!
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Love the night sky and stars and of course the Milky Way shot it is awesome but so are those light trails :)
I do like doing light trails.
Thanks.
Scott
And you do them so well :)
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Thank you
Scott
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Thanks
Scott
Those are great photos! I really loved the last photo! Thanks for sharing this with us and have a great day!
Thanks so much.
That's an amazing sky. Thanks for sharing your photo @xcountytravelers😊
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Thank you
Scott
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I dont know if I will ever have it in me to wake up that early to take pictures.
I am sure glad you do though because I wouldn't be able to see such great pictures as this! Love it ^_^
Thank You.
Astro Photography takes as much dedication as Landscape Photography, often more. It's worth it to get out in nature though, and that early in the morning you usually don't see any people other then the fishermen.
Scott
I bet its nice though to be out in that quiet and stillness.
Lovely pics. The stars are always an inspiration.
I think so too. I love living where we have stars.
Thanks.
Scott