watcherofthenightskies
20210115_campfire_night_1080
Friday night at Blackfoot - A fair number of observers and imagers gathered in this beautiful, mild night. A non-astro person drive in headlights blowing out night vision and a sub-frame or two, and proceeded to light a large campfire (this is permitted). Thankfully the hut occulted the worst of the light, but a few had direct line of sight to the blaze, and unfortunately the smoke occasionally drifted in front of the Orion nebula which several folk were imaging. It was nonetheless a picturesque scene, so I reluctantly sacrificed my imaging run to take this. A good thing that Sukrit did not want to stop her imaging because it turned out I had become distracted and never focused!
To make this composite I had to put the 40mm lens in portrait mode, take one frame on the left half, and another on the right, then combine the two panels into one using Hugin (free). Each half was a quintuplet of 8 second images at ISO 6400 which were stacked in Sequator (free), which freezes both the ground and the stars. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes from end to end to process.
20210115_campfire_night_1080
Friday night at Blackfoot - A fair number of observers and imagers gathered in this beautiful, mild night. A non-astro person drive in headlights blowing out night vision and a sub-frame or two, and proceeded to light a large campfire (this is permitted). Thankfully the hut occulted the worst of the light, but a few had direct line of sight to the blaze, and unfortunately the smoke occasionally drifted in front of the Orion nebula which several folk were imaging. It was nonetheless a picturesque scene, so I reluctantly sacrificed my imaging run to take this. A good thing that Sukrit did not want to stop her imaging because it turned out I had become distracted and never focused!
To make this composite I had to put the 40mm lens in portrait mode, take one frame on the left half, and another on the right, then combine the two panels into one using Hugin (free). Each half was a quintuplet of 8 second images at ISO 6400 which were stacked in Sequator (free), which freezes both the ground and the stars. The whole thing took maybe 10 minutes from end to end to process.