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Saint-Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint-Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.
The name day of Peter I falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church observes the memory of apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began at the same time as the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Saint Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city. When in June 1703 Peter the Great renamed the site after Saint Peter, he did not issue a naming act that established an official spelling; even in his own letters he used diverse spellings, such as Санктьпетерсьбурк (Sanktpetersburk), emulating German Sankt Petersburg, and Сантпитербурх (Santpiterburkh), emulating Dutch Sint-Pietersburgh, as Peter was multilingual and a Hollandophile. The name was later normalized and russified to Санкт-Петербург (Saint-Petersburg).
The historic architecture of Saint-Petersburg's city centre, mostly Baroque and Neoclassical buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has been largely preserved; although a number of buildings were demolished after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, during the Siege of Leningrad and in recent years. The oldest of the remaining building is a wooden house built for Peter I in 1703 on the shore of the Neva near Trinity Square. Since 1991 the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast have been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
The Pacman nebula or NGC 281 is a bright emission nebula in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia.
NGC 281 is estimated at 9200 light years from us and is 48 light years wide.
-Equipment-
Scope: TS-Optics 94/414 EPDH (414mm focal)
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro at -5°C
Guiding: ZWO OAG
Guiding camera: ZWO ASI 120MM
Mount: Skywatcher NEQ5
Filter: Optrolong L-eXtreme
-Acquisition-
Light :167x300s ( 14h ) at Gain:101 Offset:49
Dark-100x300s Flat-50 Bias-100
Date : Take on 5 night 6, 7, 8, 11, 12 september 2021
Location : France-Alsace Bortle 4/5
-Software-
Carte du Ciel, N.I.N.A, Phd2 , PoleMaster and PixInsight
I use the ForaxX palette for HOO combination
ForaxX website : thecoldestnights.com
And the Ez Processing Suite from darkarcon
darkarcon website : darkarchon.internet-box.ch:8443/
-Pre Processing in PixInsight-
Image Calibration
Cosmetic Correction
Debayer
Subframe Selector
Star Alignement
Local Normalization
Drizzle x2
Dynamic crop
-Processing
DynamicBackgroundExtractor the master_LRGB
___RGB layer___
Split RGB channels for build Ha and Oiii
Ha=R Oiii= B*0.3+G*0.7
EZ_Soft Stretch
HOO combination with Foraxx formula
R=Ha
G=((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Ha + ~((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Oiii
B=Oiii
Starnet++ for remove stars and build a mask nebula
Color Saturation
Curves Tansformation (K,saturation,hue)
Saturate stars for push up stars color
SCNR with star Mask for remove green in stars (OSC camera)
Bring back the stars with PixelMath
___L layer___
Ez_Deconvolution
Ez_Denoise
Ez_Soft Stretch
Ez_HDR
Local Histogram Equalization with nebula mask
UnsharpedMask with nebula mask
___LRGB___
Final Curve Transformation
DarkStructureEnhance script
EZ_Star Reduction
Save as BMP 32bit file
Clear skies !
Inspiration
My Fashion Icon is Lisa Fonssagrives. She was the first true Supermodel, working in the 1940s and 50s with very famous fashion photographers and featuring many times on Vogue front covers. Lisa was a ballet dancer and sculptor before being discovered as a model. I resonate with her desire to combine fashion with artistry to showcase designs and stylings. Lisa was groundbreaking at a time when models were mostly walking mannequins in fashion houses.
The photo I chose was Lisa photographed by Horst for a Vogue 1940 cover. I like vintage fashion and I also like to add twists and unexpected touches to outfits I style. I made the challenge dress, based on the dress in the photograph, but I added original touches in the silk waist sash, applique back design, and also ornate Azoury shoes. I also made my poses today, inspired by poses in vintage photos.
---------------------------
Stylecard
Bom and mesh Dress made and textured by model using full perm mesh skirt from Meli Imako and full perm mesh bow from Pira
Naomi Turban (edited) - Diram
Ingrid Stockings - Likz
Sybil Bento Gloves - Chiffon
Ostrich Feathers for Turban made by Model
Cigarette Case made by Model
Nayomi Gartner and Paris earrings, En Tournant bracelet by Lazuri (some worn on turban) ,
Paramour necklace - Rise Design (with additional 'emerald' bead prim made by model)
Happiness Does Not Wait shoes - Azoury
Jessica Vintage eyebrows - .elei.
other makeup - Lelutka, MAOER, Sap
Hair - Dice by Stealthic
All poses made by model based on 1940s and 1950s pose reference
--------------------------------------------
Original reference Photo link below:
18-Dec-14 -8C/17.6F. Cold outside or should I say cool? This sparrow made the best of it by letting the sun hit his back. The reason I am showing this less than exotic creature is because I fell in love with the light in this scene, especially the way the sun lit up the dried out needles of the cedar. Also, what I thought was kind of neat is that you can actually see the sparrow’s breath off to the right of his beak.
Off to something completely different. Alberta, Land of the Wild Rose, the official flower. And as well the official opposition party in the Legislature. Well, used to be. Nine of their fourteen remaining members, including the leader, just crossed the floor to join the ruling “Progressive” Conservatives. Even though I would have never voted for the ultraconservative Wild Rose group, they did provide an essential service in a democracy, such as an effective and very vocal opposition. And how would you feel as a voter who voted for one of these guys (non-gendered term) ? And the justifications coming out of their mouths, I should be as good at writing as these guys are at flapping their mouths. Apparently anything can be justified, even the murder of 148 people, most of them children in Pakistan. Do I equate the two, no, not really, just saying ...
And off to my favorite topic, gas prices and their relationship to quality. They have been dropping at dizzying rates and I for one was glad to be able to still be able to fill my tank at 89.9 cents where I already began to suspect the quality of the product and now we are at 80.9 cents. I am going to have to postpone any major trips until the price rises again because I suspect I will be doing major damage to my vehicle gassing up at these prices. We all know by now that quality is directly related to price, see Under the Boardwalk .
What the heck is this world coming to? But there is actually a bit of good news on the horizon and that is the pending normalization of relations between the States and Cuba. I will now be able to fly to Cuba (Canadians were able to do this before, so wait for it) and buy a really old car in Cuba, transport it to (here it is) the States and drive it all the way in the Middle of the Road to Canada unmolested by American customs. Isn’t that great? I think my Christmas wishes are coming true. I am not sure how my wife feels about trying to store another clunker in the garage. Hmmm …
Maybe we shouldn't normalize it for humans either. Every other media form shuns it. Why not photography?
It's kind of personal. Smoking killed my father.
Imagination/Photoshop/unspecified combinations of AI software for source material.
2025-01-28
Winter Star Party, Scout Key, FL
This is an HOO image. I processed using a workflow that included narrowband normalization. It is interesting to compare this image with the same image I posted a few weeks ago where I used the Foraxx palate.
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC
Guide Camera: QHY5III462
Telescope: Vixen ED80SF F/7.5
Mount: Losmandy G11
Integration: 32 x 900s=450m (7.5h)
Filter: Optolong L-Ultimate Dual
Capture: NINA
Processing: Pixinsight, Affinity
There is a certain tendency to call "paella" to any seasoned rice, and only because it has a certain yellow color.
However, it has been normalized for a long time and it has been registered that in order for this "rice with something" to finally be called "paella" without running the risk of being excommunicated by some fan of the designation of origin, this rice has to have specific ingredients.
In this case, the rice, in addition to the usual dressing and condiments, prepared by my dear (and only) brother, had as its main material, always having some animal protein, pork and that fungus known as "boletus edulis".
But without getting into the game of what is the correct name and defoliating the daisy if it is paella or not paella, or "rice with something", what I can say in a completely safe way is that this "rice with something" was delicious.
Photo generated by the focus stacking procedure, without using artificial intelligence, although I'm not entirely sure that my intelligence is partly artificial...
Thanks dear brother!
UN DELICIOSO ARROZ, AL ESTILO DE MI HERMANO, 2023
Existe cierta tendencia a llamar "paella" a cualquier arroz condimentado, y solo porque que tiene cierto color amarillo.
Sin embargo hace tiempo que se normalizó y se registró que para que ese "arroz con algo" lo podamos finalmente llamar "paella" sin correr el riesgo de ser excomulgados por algún fanático de la denominación de origen, ese arroz tiene que tener unos ingredientes concretos.
En este caso, el arroz, además del aderezo y condimentos habituales, preparado por mi querido (y único) hermano, llevaba como materia principal, teniendo siempre algo de proteína animal, presa de cerdo y ese hongo conocido como "boletus edulis".
Pero sin entrar en el juego de cuál es el nombre correcto y deshojar la margarita de si es paella o no es paella, o "arroz con algo", lo que sí puedo decir de una manera totalmente segura es que ese "arroz con algo" estaba delicioso.
Foto generada por el procedimiento de apilamiento de enfoque, sin usar inteligencia artificial, aunque no estoy totalmente seguro de que mi inteligencia sea parcialmente artificial...
¡Gracias, querido hermano!
Let's normalize being alone because we want peace and to isolate ourselves for a while from everything and everyone.
Bali has four lakes – Lake Buyan and Lake Tamblingan in the Buleleng regency; Lake Beratan in Tabanan regency; and Lake Batur in the Bangli regency.
Lake Buyan is a smallest lake in Bali located just a next door of Lake Tamblingan which is known as Twin Lakes. It is located in the plateau area with cool weather cover it. It is situated in the high land with hill and rain forest surrounds it. Since the location in the plateau area, the fog is usually blanketing the area. This lake can be seen from the top of hill of Gobleg. Gobleg it self is the name of the countryside located on the top of hill where the villager with agriculture life on top of it.
Lake Buyan own the broadness about 3,9 Km, with the maximum of deepness of Lake Buyan is 87 meters and the water volume is 0,116 km3, is considered to be the most severely polluted and also Lake Buyan has faced a 3.5 meters (11 feet) drop in water levels every year since year 2000, leaving many locals puzzled.
The shallow depths of the lake and pollution are due to the erosion of soil from nearby mountains, the rapid uncontrolled growth of water hyacinths (enceng gondok) and seepage into the lakes of fertilizers from surrounding farm lands.
Environmentalists and some government officials say the problems could become worse unless significant investment is made and people started conserving water.Bali’s governor told the press that the “normalization” of Bali’s lake is an absolute priority, with the government required to quickly devise a recovery program for the island’s freshwater lakes.
Canon EOS 50D
EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM
0.033sec • f/14 • 18mm • ISO100
HITECH Filter ND Grad 3-stops HE
RAW proccessed with Digital Photo Pro: removed Chromatic Aberration+TiFF converted.
TIFF proccessed with Adobe Photoshop CS3: resized+sharpened.
View Large for more detail.
Honest comment/critique are welcome, thanks guys :)
This is an image shot in a special way and then processed further to look like a painting. If you are interested, the details of how this was done are below. The subject is turbulent, rapidly flowing, flood-stage water in a small river.
Creating the image was fun. Here is how it was done:
NB1 - Although the image was finally heavily posterized during editing, its textured character is not artificial. It is due to the movement of the water during exposure at a deliberately intermediate shutter speed: 1/30s.
IMO, substantially faster shutter speeds (e.g. 1/250s+) make flowing water look artificially "frozen." Much slower speeds (e.g. 5s+) make flowing water look artificially "fuzzy." In contrast, shutter speeds around 1/30s capture rapidly moving water "in the act of flowing." However, for sharpness, it is also necessary to use either a camera or lens with image stabilization (as here) or a tripod.
NB2 - The dramatic contrast is also due to the way the image was shot before processing. It was deliberately over-exposed, so that it initially appeared washed out. The dramatic contrasts are the result of the editing program's subsequent effort to normalize the exposure when its "auto-levels” tool was applied.
NB3 - The overall blue tint is completely artificial. It was a cloudy winter day. To the eye, the water was mostly shades of gray. During editing, I just set a blue filter at a hue I liked that also produced a range of intensities that I liked.
NB4 - After all that, I used the my editing program's Posterize tool and Sharpen Luminance tool.
The whole process was fun. 😎
Location: River Wiese, during a flash flood caused by a sudden winter thaw. Basel City, Kanton Basel-Stadt, Schweiz (Switzerland).
In my album: Dan's Water World.
I don't normally post animals, but I thought I would make an exception. Hardly the expert on animals, the running joke on this trip was that I could not recall which were Mountain Sheep, and which were Mountain Goats. I finally gave up and called them all Mountain Sheepgoats. However, for this post, I clarified that this is indeed a Mountain Goat. We found this medium sized fella all alone on a trail near Logan's Pass in Glacier National Park. The elusive Mountain Goat was on the top of my wife's list of must see's for the trip, so at every turn on every trail we asked those coming down the hill if they had seen any.
The crowds alone should have been enough to tell where they could have been. There was a mob scene where this guy was. I pulled out my biggest lens and started shooting away. Some gal next to me with a point and shoot said that it was cheating using lenses like mine, because that's not what we actually saw. I chuckled and said that when you lug these heavy lenses up a mountain, you earn the right to use them.
The air was still quite smokey which gave this unique color cast to the skylight that made it through the smoke. The colors in this image are not that exaggerated, the smoke was boosting the color with odd orange and other almost ghostly colors. I tried to normalize them a little, but I was actually quite pleased with what was left.
Enjoy!
So if you have been wondering why I’ve been absent lately, blame this beast of a build, my second largest ever. 6 weeks and 3623 dark red 1x1 slopes later…As usual, 100% LEGO.
Inspired by this architectural photo by Heinrich Pollmeier.
———————
Prosperity Once More
An entry for Global Contest IX from the Lands of Roawia Castle Builders Game
The City Hall of Durrough is an interesting structure, the most modern in the entire region, if not all of Roawia. Its striking roof and colors stand out significantly amongst Durrough’s more traditional buildings. A mixture of the latest Lenfald architecture with highlights of sandstone and roof tiles from Loreos, it was meant to be a sign of friendship between the two neighboring lands; a political symbol of the important trade Durrough had right across the Aines river mouth which the city guarded. Unfortunately only three months after its completion the two lands went to war, and this made the heavily Loreos-influenced edifice less than popular with the citizenry. In fact the Queen’s troops easily occupied it as Durrough folk weren’t particularly interested in keeping it as their center of banking and courts. Times were different now though, with the Queen’s evil influence removed and relationships and trade with Loreos normalizing…which is exactly the reason High Lord Triphian chose its speaking platform as the ideal spot to give his returning victory speech.
“My fellow citizens, now is the time for recovery! For rebuilding that which was lost; for sowing the seeds of our new crops; for reestablishing friendships once strained but now full of hope, and for families to be reunited after this terrible time of oppression and war.” Triphian had come to his main point in his speech to the people of Durrough, a people not long liberated from the oppressive fists of the Queen’s troops, and his listeners rewarded him with another round of applause, happy that the Provincial leader had chosen Durrough as his harbor of return from campaign. Standing beside him was Durrough’s own stalwart leader, Duke Cartney, who had already delivered a short and therefore good speech on their victory, especially thanking the heroes who liberated the city during one brutal late-summer morning, not that long ago. Among those thanked were both Sir Caelan Munro, now standing in a place of honor behind Triphian, and Sir Haymar, who was not present, as he had had the good common sense to “avoid another silly speech from bureaucrats” by selectively being off “pursuing a band of brigands” just at the right time. And standing behind Sir Caelan was Lady Kenzie, who was very much on his mind right now instead of the speech.
The young baron however was brought out of his pleasant thoughts of an impending proposal back to the present situation, when Lord Triphian spoke of matters which no doubt would pertain to his not-so distant future.
“My people, you so deserve a time of peace. [applause again from the crowd] Yet in order to have that peace we must finally rid ourselves of this false Queen, this liar and conniver and stealer of wealth and tranquility, but I have returned not with news of more war for you, no, but for the professionals such as Sir Caelan here” —and this was where Caelan really woke up and started to pay attention—“for soon I must call on our valiant knights once more to finish the task, but not you, my people. I will not rob you of your husbands again, I will not call on your sons and brothers, no, but when the time comes our knights will carry the torch of righteous battle to give the Queen what she badly deserves!” [much applause here from a war-weary people].
So this was news, and Caelan started to ponder what it meant…certainly Triphian knew something more than he was divulging now, but there would still be time for that proposal, he was determined….and again his mind was interrupted by Triphian’s final rallying point, to prolonged applause.
“But for you my people of Lenfald, prosperity once more!”
We took a bus tour of the city, and were intrigued to find this place - we might visit later in the week, but have been told we need to respect their wishes and avoid photography - so this is all you will get!
Christiania, also known as Freetown Christiania (Danish: Fristaden Christiania) is a self-proclaimed autonomous neighborhood of about 850 residents, covering 34 hectares (84 acres) in the borough of Christianshavn in the Danish capital Copenhagen. Civic authorities in Copenhagen regard Christiania as a large commune, but the area has a unique status in that it is regulated by a special law, the Christiania Law of 1989, which transfers parts of the supervision of the area from the municipality of Copenhagen to the state. It was closed by residents in April 2011, whilst discussions continued with the Danish government as to its future, but is now open again.[1]
Christiania has been a source of controversy since its creation in a squatted military area in 1971. Its cannabis trade was tolerated by authorities until 2004. In the years following 2004, measures for normalizing the legal status of the community led to conflicts, police raids and negotiations. More recent governments have, however, been more tolerant.[citation needed]
Among many Christiania residents, the community is known as "staden" ("the town"), short for "fristaden" ("the freetown").
Honor Princess Carrie Fisher
Normalize mental illness and its treatment
Take life less seriously
Destroy a fascist regime
Saint-Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint-Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.
The name day of Peter I falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church observes the memory of apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began at the same time as the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Saint Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city. When in June 1703 Peter the Great renamed the site after Saint Peter, he did not issue a naming act that established an official spelling; even in his own letters he used diverse spellings, such as Санктьпетерсьбурк (Sanktpetersburk), emulating German Sankt Petersburg, and Сантпитербурх (Santpiterburkh), emulating Dutch Sint-Pietersburgh, as Peter was multilingual and a Hollandophile. The name was later normalized and russified to Санкт-Петербург (Saint-Petersburg).
The historic architecture of Saint-Petersburg's city centre, mostly Baroque and Neoclassical buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has been largely preserved; although a number of buildings were demolished after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, during the Siege of Leningrad and in recent years. The oldest of the remaining building is a wooden house built for Peter I in 1703 on the shore of the Neva near Trinity Square. Since 1991 the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast have been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Gaslighting.
Cultivarea discernământului performanțe critice artă înaltă evocarea textelor critice întrebări de afaceri reale răspunsuri demonstrații analize abordări,
codes cachés explorations esthétiques romantiques découvrir des œuvres intersections représentations juxtapositions surprenantes visions du monde,
καθιερωμένες αναφορές ριζικά σημεία στίξης αυστηρή σύνταξη προδοσία φανταχτερές προτάσεις ζωτικής σημασίας πειστικά γράμματα μιλούν έντονοι λεκτικοί συνειρμοί,
ترجمة الأوامر العقلانية ، النقاط غير المنتظمة ، الميزة المزدوجة ، توليد التعديلات ، الشحنات غير المحددة ، شظايا الفروق الخطابية المعاصرة العصرية,
formas suasorias ebullientes tripudiantes absurditates metaphysicae phrases normalized notae indeclinabiles logicae picturesque exempla intendens oculos legentium,
発行された本を彷彿とさせる明白なマスター黄金の方向煮るピアノ技術の調理エラー重要なお茶ありそうもないレシピフレーバーウォーターを装った比喩が明るく照らされた.
Steve.D.Hammond.
Lazarevsky Bridge is a cable-stayed bridge located in St. Petersburg. It crosses the Little Nevka River, connecting Krestovsky Island and Petrogradsky Island. The bridge carries four lanes of road traffic and features an asymmetric design, with cable stays anchored to a pylon on the Krestovsky Island side.
Lazarevsky Bridge was completed in 2009. It replaced another bridge on the same site, which was built in 1949. The old bridge was a beam bridge made of steel and wood.
Saint-Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint-Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.
The name day of Peter I falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church observes the memory of apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began at the same time as the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Saint Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city. When in June 1703 Peter the Great renamed the site after Saint Peter, he did not issue a naming act that established an official spelling; even in his own letters he used diverse spellings, such as Санктьпетерсьбурк (Sanktpetersburk), emulating German Sankt Petersburg, and Сантпитербурх (Santpiterburkh), emulating Dutch Sint-Pietersburgh, as Peter was multilingual and a Hollandophile. The name was later normalized and russified to Санкт-Петербург (Saint-Petersburg).
The historic architecture of Saint-Petersburg's city centre, mostly Baroque and Neoclassical buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has been largely preserved; although a number of buildings were demolished after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, during the Siege of Leningrad and in recent years. The oldest of the remaining building is a wooden house built for Peter I in 1703 on the shore of the Neva near Trinity Square. Since 1991 the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast have been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Another picture made during yesterdays "Orange night" of Ulm.
This picture is made of 30 shots I combined with the software "startrails". Afterwards I added some FHDR processing, some normalization and some manual processing to get this result. Just a first startrail attempt after I realized how to produce the necessary series with my E-M5. This series was quite short but I hope you like these "startrails" anyway.
Broadband Version:
I recommend looking at this image on astrobin on full screen on a computer: app.astrobin.com/i/7thh0y
If you hover over, it'll show a narrowband overlay. And when you click and open in full screen, you can zoom to 1x resolution to see the breadth of the large magellanic cloud taken from an observatory in South Africa. I'm not able to upload the full resolution versions to discuss but attached is the lower res version.
I gave two talks at NEAIC where this image was the centerpiece so people who attended got a first look at it. This was taken from an observatory telescope we're renting (2 friends + 1) in South Africa. it's a 12 panel mosaic, the full resolution is about 260 megapixels but this is cropped down to about 160 megapixels, mostly due to an error during cropping when I was processing.
The stacked file was more than 3gb in size. Fully stacked in Siril and all 12 panels took a whopping 22 minutes to stack and stitch automatically using my OSC preprocessing script. At NEAIC, I stacked two of those panels during the talk just as a demonstration on an old Windows 10 laptop and it took less than 2 minutes.
I had some normalization issues with the Narrowband version because we didn't have enough signal on two of the frames so I restitched the final stack in APP.
Equipment:
Telescope: Askar SQA85
Camera: QHYCCD QHY268 Pro C
Mount: Proxisky UMi 20S
Filters: Antlia ALP-T Dual Band 5nm 2", QHYCCD UV/IR CUT
Software: Adobe Photoshop, Astro Pixel Processor (APP), PixInsight, Siril
Total integration: 71h 10m
Comet 220P/McNaught early Monday morning. This periodic comet orbits the sun every five and a half years and is usually rather faint. But this summer it had two outbursts. The latest, a couple weeks ago increased its brightness about 600 times.
The background sky was something else too. I wasn’t aware that the integrated flux nebulosity in this part of Cetus would be so interesting. At first, I was confused that maybe my flat field was really bad or that there were passing clouds and I wasn’t properly normalizing the image. But after starting to stretch it, it was clearly background nebulosity. So fascinating! Also noting you can see just a bit of curvature in the comet's tail.
-----------------
17 August 2026 / 1023-1130 UTC
Canon EOS R5
ZenithStar 61 II APO
iOptron SkyGuider Pro
65 x 60 sec., ISO 6400
This is how Artsy and I work during the 2nd half of the day. She's really a great partner to do pair programming with, always enthusiastically endorsing my craziest ideas and also silently taking the blame for many of my blunders.
"Yuck, who wrote this code? Was it you Artsy?" -- her face with a guilty look on it (it was actually me).
"Did we normalize that vector before taking the cross product?" -- blank expression telling me exactly what I need to know.
Artsy is also great at letting me know when it's time to take a break. I'm not sure what her official title would be, maybe Software Engineering Cheerleader or Assistant Software Engineer?
Target: NGC281 Pac-Man Nebula
The Pacman nebula is named for the video game it resembles. If you put the moon in front of this nebula you would just block it. It is located 9200 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia, which resembles a W or M in the northern skies.
Gear:
Mount: ZWO AM5
Main Cam: ZWO ASI294MC Pro @ gain 121 and 14F
Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120MM Mini with ZWO 30mm f/4 scope
Lens: Sigma 150-600 @ 600
Filter: Antlia ALP-T 5nm Ha and Oiii
Acquisition:
Light frames: Best 48 of 66 5 minute subs totaling 4 Hr integration
Sessions: 20-Sep-23
Location: Waller, Texas country road
Bortle: 5/6 ?
Moon: none for most of session
Processing
• PI - Subframe selector, WBPP
• GraXpert background
• PI SPCC
• PI Russel Croman - BXT NXT STX
• PI Starless Edits
○ Bill Blanshan Mike Cranfield Narrowband Normalization Tool
○ Bill Blanshan GHS Stretch
○ Curves
○ Dark Structure Enhance
• PI Stars Edits
○ Arcsinh Stretch
○ SCNR, Invert and SCNR
○ Curve Saturation
• PS ACR Black point, Highlights, Clarity, Dehaze
• PS Selective Colors
• PS Screen stars layer, copy stars layer/brighten it/mask in selective stars
• PS Watermark
L(RGB) = 6x480s(5x240s:5x240s:5x240s)
L = 1x1bin
RGB = 2x2bin
12" R-C in rodeo, new mexico (lightbuckets.com LB-0003)
stacked with deepskystacker
initial processing with pixinsight 1.5
- normalization of ngc1977 vs. m42 data
- all subs aligned to luminance data
- rgb merge
- combined ngc1977 and m42 data with pixel math to produce a single image
- deconvolution
- histogram stretch (x10) of merged rgb data and luminance data
enfuse:
- HDR blend of all exposures generated in pixinsight
- luminance: hard mask, mean=0.54026, sigma=0.23154
- rgb: hard mask, mean=0.64026, sigma=0.23154, l-star grey projector
- had to duplicate the unstretched exposure 8 times to recover trapezium
photoshop: remove geosynchronous satellite streaks
pixinsight:
- histogram fixes and color calibration of rgb images
- histogram fixes, dark structure enhancement and atrous wavelets on luminance image
- LRGB merge
- chop composite image back into 2 separate images
- further histogram fix of ngc1977 to better match m42
hugin:
- stitch of ngc1977 and m42 images
lightroom:
- fix red/magenta saturation (pixinsight is running without color management... long story)
- crop
comments: the deconvolution is kind of bad... its heavy duty signal processing work that requires more patience than i could muster. as a result i've got some ringing and sharpening of bogus features.
it was really hard to get the two images to have the same brightness even though the exposures were the same. different nights, different amount of moon, different sky transparency all conspire to make two identically exposed images very different.
finally this is HDR so although the relative brightness between m42 and ngc1977 should be correct, the dynamic range of both have been greatly compressed. most other treatements of these objects show ngc1977 much fainter than seen here. but what is realistic when dealing with astrophotography?
Paul Tracy - CHAMP Cars - Road America, Aug 12, 2007. INDECK - Forsythe Championship Racing. Tracy started 16th and finished 12th in the race, won by Sebastien Bourdais. This shot was taken from the inside of Canada Corner (Turn 12) at Road America. Cars decelerate rapidly at the end of a straight that is hidden from my view, then turn 90 degrees right, flashing in front of me for a second before racing back up a sweeping hill.
So the shot had to be timed based on sound and fleeting glimpses of the approaching car. I wanted to blur the colored curbing but capture the car close-up. So panning smoothly but very quickly was key to the shot. No cropping or Photoshop special effects here - I only normalized the lighting and contrast.
Technical Specs:
Camera/lens: Canon 5D with 70-300mm zoom set at 300mm
Shutter Speed: 1/100 sec
Aperture: f/25
ISO: 400
This is another image of the Eagle Nebula (M16) taken with a RASA 8 telescope and an unfiltered ASI2600MC Pro camera. An SHO type palette was applied to the OSC image in Pixinsight using Narrowband Normalization process.
Saint-Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint-Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.
The name day of Peter I falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church observes the memory of apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began at the same time as the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Saint Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city. When in June 1703 Peter the Great renamed the site after Saint Peter, he did not issue a naming act that established an official spelling; even in his own letters he used diverse spellings, such as Санктьпетерсьбурк (Sanktpetersburk), emulating German Sankt Petersburg, and Сантпитербурх (Santpiterburkh), emulating Dutch Sint-Pietersburgh, as Peter was multilingual and a Hollandophile. The name was later normalized and russified to Санкт-Петербург (Saint-Petersburg).
The historic architecture of Saint-Petersburg's city centre, mostly Baroque and Neoclassical buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has been largely preserved; although a number of buildings were demolished after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, during the Siege of Leningrad and in recent years. The oldest of the remaining building is a wooden house built for Peter I in 1703 on the shore of the Neva near Trinity Square. Since 1991 the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast have been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
iTelescope T21
The comet is now rapidly fading. It is also descending toward the horizon in twilight so it is a race to see if the tail disappears before the comet is unobservable.
All four images processed together to normalize the brightness decline.
One of the astronomy events of 2024, and one that was widely observed,
Narrowband Version: I recommend looking at this image on astrobin on full screen on a computer: app.astrobin.com/i/7thh0y
If you hover over, it'll show a narrowband overlay. And when you click and open in full screen, you can zoom to 1x resolution to see the breadth of the large magellanic cloud taken from an observatory in South Africa. I'm not able to upload the full resolution versions to discuss but attached is the lower res version.
I gave two talks at NEAIC where this image was the centerpiece so people who attended got a first look at it. This was taken from an observatory telescope we're renting (2 friends + 1) in South Africa. it's a 12 panel mosaic, the full resolution is about 260 megapixels but this is cropped down to about 160 megapixels, mostly due to an error during cropping when I was processing.
The stacked file was more than 3gb in size. Fully stacked in Siril and all 12 panels took a whopping 22 minutes to stack and stitch automatically using my OSC preprocessing script. At NEAIC, I stacked two of those panels during the talk just as a demonstration on an old Windows 10 laptop and it took less than 2 minutes.
I had some normalization issues with the Narrowband version because we didn't have enough signal on two of the frames so I restitched the final stack in APP.
Equipment:
Telescope: Askar SQA85
Camera: QHYCCD QHY268 Pro C
Mount: Proxisky UMi 20S
Filters: Antlia ALP-T Dual Band 5nm 2", QHYCCD UV/IR CUT
Software: Adobe Photoshop, Astro Pixel Processor (APP), PixInsight, Siril
Total integration: 71h 10m
The Great American Solar Eclipse
Observed and imaged on August 21st, 2017 from Sainte Genevieve, MO. (Totality of 2min 40sec)
This High-Dynamic-Range composite of the corona consists of 11 different exposure times ranging from 1/1000" to 1".
Equipment:
OTA: William Optics GT81 w/0.8x reducer (382mm fl at f/4.7)
Mount: Orion Sirius EQ-G (HEQ-5)
Imaging camera: Canon t3i (unmodified)
Software:
EQMOD
SETnC (automated camera control for eclipse imaging)
Photoshop
PixInsight
Acquisition:
ISO100
1/1000"
1/500"
1/250"
1/125"
1/60"
1/30"
1/15"
1/8"
1/4"
1/2"
1"
PreProcessing:
Photoshop:
Opened each exposure as a layer and manually aligned them all to each other.
Exported each aligned exposure as a TIFF.
PixInsight: (my take on the "Mean Stacking" method)
Used ImageIntegration tool with Average combination, no PixelRejection, no Normalization, and ignoring Weights and any NoiseEvaluation to stack all of the exposures together as an effective HDR.
Processing:
PixInsight:
DynamicCrop
HistogramTransformation x3 (using RangeMasks to essentially perform a masked stretch)
PixelMath equation "1-(1-$T)*(1-$T)" in conjunction with a RangeMask to push the outer corona details
HDRMultiscaleTransform with a scale of 9 layers
CurvesTransformation for slight contrast
UnSharpMask to sharpen outer corona with a RangeMask, and then inverting the RangeMask to sharpen the inner corona
LocalHistogramEqualization with an L mask to increase contrast and details in outer corona, then doing same thing but with a RangeMask to only work on inner corona.
CurvesTransformation for slight contrast
ACDNR for slight noise reduction
Export as TIFF
Photoshop:
Added the earthshine moon as a crop from my 1" exposure.
Histogram transformation followed by curves on the moon layer to show contrast in the moon.
UnSharp tool on the moon layer to sharpen moon features
Dust and Scratches with a 2pixel radius on the moon layer.
Final curves adjustment on the moon layer.
Flatten layers
MatchColor with a mask to saturate the prominences.
Flatten and export
Saint-Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint-Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.
The name day of Peter I falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church observes the memory of apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began at the same time as the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Saint Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city. When in June 1703 Peter the Great renamed the site after Saint Peter, he did not issue a naming act that established an official spelling; even in his own letters he used diverse spellings, such as Санктьпетерсьбурк (Sanktpetersburk), emulating German Sankt Petersburg, and Сантпитербурх (Santpiterburkh), emulating Dutch Sint-Pietersburgh, as Peter was multilingual and a Hollandophile. The name was later normalized and russified to Санкт-Петербург (Saint-Petersburg).
The historic architecture of Saint-Petersburg's city centre, mostly Baroque and Neoclassical buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has been largely preserved; although a number of buildings were demolished after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, during the Siege of Leningrad and in recent years. The oldest of the remaining building is a wooden house built for Peter I in 1703 on the shore of the Neva near Trinity Square. Since 1991 the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast have been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Todo apunta a que la circulación de este tren se ha normalizado por completo constituyendo un poderoso aliciente para acercarnos al norte de la provincia de Burgos todos los jueves que podamos. Mi llegada a Pancorbo me recordó los viejos tiempos en los que según te bajabas del coche aparecía un tren al que, como mucho, le hacías una foto de circunstancias. Este jueves me ocurrió con un bonito TECO de Transfesa que se presentó segundos después de mi llegada. Pero, cuando aún no había terminado de soltar la inevitable retahila de improperios, llegó el turno de un siderúrgico de Renfe procedente de Miranda de Ebro.
" ¿Pero esto que es?" - me preguntaba una y otra vez sin salir de mi estupefacción.
Muy desconcertado, comencé a caminar hasta alcanzar el punto desde el que hice esta foto y en el trayecto me di la vuelta no menos de diecisiete veces por si acaso volvía a circular un tren, pero ya la línea había vuelto a su mísera realidad y no volví a ver un mercante hasta que tres horas después apareció el frutero de Continental. En esta ocasión contaba con la colaboración de un amigo que me dio la hora estimada del paso del tren por Pancorbo. La foto parecía que iba a ser un juego de niños pero a la hora señalada el tren se hacía de rogar y en su lugar se presentaba, arrastrándose a paso de tortuga, una solitaria y grafiteada 253 que para más recochineo se detuvo un buen rato a la altura del fotógrafo. Finalmente continuó su trayecto hacia Miranda y en ese momento reparé en una enorme nube que se había formado de la nada y que amenazaba con ocultar el sol. Pasaban los minutos y el TECO seguía sin aparecer mientras que la nube crecía irremisiblemente. Cuando por fin apareció el preciado objetivo del día lo hizo con tanta parsimonia que casi me da un ataque de ansiedad porque, además, la nube estaba a punto de tapar el sol. Finalmente el tren llegó a mi altura y su lentitud se convirtió en una ventaja porque pude hacerle fotos desde diferentes encuadres, algo que no es nada fácil cuando usas una cámara compacta. Finalmente la nube no consiguió salirse con la suya y pocos minutos después se evaporó para no volver a incordiar en toda la mañana.
Everything indicates that the circulation of this train has been completely normalized, constituting a powerful incentive to get closer to the north of the province of Burgos every Thursday that we can. My arrival at Pancorbo reminded me of the old days when, as you got out of the car, a train would appear to which, at most, you took a photo of circumstances. This Thursday it happened to me with a beautiful freight of the company Transfesa that appeared seconds after my arrival. But, when I had not yet finished releasing the inevitable string of insults, it was the turn of a Renfe steel freight from Miranda de Ebro.
" But what is this?" - I asked myself over and over again without leaving my stupefaction.
Very disconcerted, I started walking until I reached the point from which I took this photo and on the way I turned around no less than seventeen times in case a train was running again, but the line had already returned to its miserable reality and I did not see a freight again until three hours later Continental´s fruits freight appeared. On this occasion I had the collaboration of a friend who gave me the estimated time of the train passing through Pancorbo. The photo seemed like it was going to be child's play but at the appointed time the train was hard to come by and in its place appeared, crawling at a snail's pace, a solitary and graffitied TRAXX locomotive that, to be more annoying, stopped for a long time at the height of the photographer. Finally it continued its journey towards Miranda and at that moment I noticed a huge cloud that had formed out of nowhere and threatened to hide the sun. The minutes passed and the freight continued without appearing while the cloud grew inexorably. When the cherished goal of the day finally appeared, it did so slowly that I almost had an anxiety attack because, furthermore, the cloud was about to cover the sun. Finally the train reached my height and its slowness became an advantage because I was able to take photos of it from different frames, something that is not easy when you use a compact camera. Finally the cloud was not able to get away with it and a few minutes later it evaporated so as not to bother again in the whole morning.
“Writing Our America” longreads.com/2017/02/09/writing-our-america/
DONALD TRUMP’S FIRING OF JAMES COMEY IS AN ATTACK ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/donald-trump-has-atta...
―original photo by @junpyo18, 11 Feb. 2017
The word autumn comes from the ancient Etruscan root autu- and has within it connotations of the passing of the year.[11] It was borrowed by the neighbouring Romans, and became the Latin word autumnus.[12] After the Roman era, the word continued to be used as the Old French word autompne (automne in modern French) or autumpne in Middle English,[13] and was later normalized to the original Latin. In the Medieval period, there are rare examples of its use as early as the 12th century, but by the 16th century, it was in common use.
IC410 CGEPro/STL6303/AOL/MOAG/TO A130 Ha Oiii Sii 9X900 bin1 Each channel normalized on max emmision, Instead of Hubble mapping this has H-alph as blue, Sii as red, Oii as green. I kind of like this mapping better, something is just unpleasant when you mix green with red :) This change was performed simply by extracting the RGB channels and recombining in a different order.
Found this baby gecko in the kitchen sink this evening. It was on the side which houses the garbage disposal. I covered the disposal hole with a cup and chased it around for a minute or two before I was able to finally grab the little critter.
Since I don't see baby geckos too often, I decided I'd shoot it before I let it go.
After I slowly wandered around the house gathering up my camera gear and tripod, then went through the process of setting everything up, I let loose of the "slight" grip I had on it in order to get it into position to be shot.
As I slowly released pressure, it became quite clear he wasn't going anywhere. He didn't move at all. Even when I tried to scoot him off my finger, he just looked up at me and laid there...Legs splayed and motionless.
I was horrified thinking I had accidentally turned it into a little quadriplegic...And where on Earth was I gonna find an electric wheel chair small enough?!
After I dropped a little water on his head he slowly began to normalize. I guess my "slight" grip crushed the wind outta the little fella.
My new problem was I couldn't get him off me. I think he thought I was his mother. I'm not sure how he could have thought that since I wasn't wearin' a shirt at the time.
Anyway, I took advantage of him calling my hand home and took a number of photos. Most of 'em turned out pretty well. He was a great poser and wasn't frightened at all by the flash.
I'll post some others at a later date.
You can get a better view of him here.
TS-Optics Photoline 140mm f/6.5
ToupTek ATR2600C
iOptron CEM70G
Antlia Tri Band RGB Pro 2"
TS-Optics TSFlat3
49 frames - 300 sec
Moon 77%
Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight · Stefan Berg Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy (N.I.N.A. / NINA)
Pixinsight NarrowBand Normalization - Palette SHO
Starless version
Original image : flic.kr/p/2mAbyBW
-Equipment-
Scope: TS-Optics 94/414 EPDH (414mm focal)
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC Pro at -15°C
Guiding: ZWO OAG
Guiding camera: ZWO ASI 120MM
Mount: Skywatcher NEQ5
Filter: Optrolong L-eXtreme
-Acquisition-
Light :218x300s ( 18h ) at Gain:101 Offset:49
Dark-100x300s Flat-50 Bias-100
Date : Take on 5 night 29, 30 september 2021
and 7, 8, 9 october 2021
Location : France-Alsace Bortle 4/5
-Software-
Carte du Ciel, N.I.N.A, Phd2 , PoleMaster and PixInsight
I use the ForaxX palette for HOO combination
ForaxX website : thecoldestnights.com
And the Ez Processing Suite from darkarcon
darkarcon website : darkarchon.internet-box.ch:8443/
-Pre Processing in PixInsight-
Image Calibration
Cosmetic Correction
Debayer
Subframe Selector
Star Alignement
Local Normalization
Drizzle x2
Dynamic crop
-Processing
Split the master_LRGB into L, R, G, B layer
DynamicBackgroundExtractor each layer
___RGB layer___
Split RGB channels for build Ha and Oiii
Ha=R Oiii= B*0.3+G*0.7
EZ_Soft Stretch
HOO combination with Foraxx formula
R=Ha
G=((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Ha + ~((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Oiii
B=Oiii
Starnet++ for remove stars and build a mask nebula
Color Saturation
Curves Tansformation (K,saturation,hue)
Saturate stars for push up stars color
SCNR with star Mask for remove green in stars (OSC camera)
Bring back the stars with PixelMath
___L layer___
Ez_Deconvolution
Ez_Denoise
Ez_Soft Stretch
Ez_HDR
Local Histogram Equalization with nebula mask
UnsharpedMask with nebula mask
___LRGB___
Final Curve Transformation
DarkStructureEnhance script
EZ_Star Reduction
Starnet ++ in pixinsight to remove Stars
Save as BMP 32bit file
Clear skies !
Kevin was given some flowers on his birthday, so I decided to get some nice macro shots of them.
Also, can we please normalize giving men flowers? I think it's adorable.
Target: SH2-159 Lobster Claw Nebula
This nebula lies between the constellations of Cassiopeia and Cepheus. In the upper right is the beginnings of the Bubble Nebula that I recently imaged. I used a dual narrowband filter (Ha and Oiii) and processed this as a HOO pallet with the reds indicating Hydrogen and blues Oxygen.
Gear:
Mount: ZWO AM5
Main Cam: ZWO ASI294MC Pro @ gain 121 and 8F
Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120MM Mini with ZWO 30mm f/4 scope
Telescope: Askar 103APO w/ 0.8x reducer/flattener - 420mm f/4
Filter: Antlia ALP-T Dual Narrowband 5nm Ha and Oiii
Acquisition:
Light frames: 91 5min subs for 7hr 35Min integration
Sessions: 09-Oct-2024
Moon: 8 days old 35% 111deg from target
Location: Houston Backyard ~ Bortle 8/9
Processing
• Pixinsight Auto DBE, BTX, STX
• Pixinsight split starless channels, NXT
• Pixinsight Create HOO channels
• Ha = R • Oiii = .5*B+.5*G
• Pixinsight Statistical stretch
• Pixinsight Create HOO image
• R = Ha
• G = ((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Ha + ~((Oiii*Ha)^~(Oiii*Ha))*Oiii
• B = Oiii
• Pixinsight Narrowband Normalization HOO, Lightness Ha, Blend Mode 1 Amount 0
• Pixinsight HT black point and balance channels, Curves for saturation
• Pixinsight Stretch Stars using - Star Stretch
• Pixinsight HT black point color balance, Saturation Curves
• Photoshop ACR contrast, black point, clarity, de haze
• Photoshop Selective Colors, ACR, channel D&B to balance colors
• Photoshop Screen stars, duplicate layer/black mask/reveal select stars
• Photoshop Final curves, watermark
Gauri Lankesh was born in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, on 29 January 1962, daughter of the well-known writer and journalist P. Lankesh, founder of the Kannada weekly Lankesh Patrike. She grew up in a strongly secular and progressive intellectual environment shaped by literature, political debate and independent journalism. She studied journalism and began working as a reporter for national publications, including The Times of India, before returning to Bengaluru to collaborate with her father’s newspaper. After P. Lankesh’s death in 2000, she took over editorial responsibilities and later founded her own weekly, Gauri Lankesh Patrike, maintaining an independent, secular editorial line openly critical of Hindu nationalist politics and sectarian extremism. She was not only a journalist but a public intellectual engaged in civic life: she defended the Indian Constitution, minority rights, and the rights of marginalized communities; she supported dialogue aimed at social reintegration of insurgent groups; and she consistently exposed hate campaigns, disinformation networks and radicalization. She was known for her explicit criticism of the ideology of Hindutva and for publicly challenging organizations and individuals associated with extremist nationalist movements. In 2016 she was convicted of defamation in a case brought by political figures aligned with nationalist parties, but the sentence was suspended pending appeal. For years she had received threats. On the evening of 5 September 2017, while returning to her home in Bengaluru, she was shot multiple times at close range by assailants on a motorcycle. She died at the scene. Subsequent investigations led to the arrest of several suspects connected to an extremist network linked to Hindutva ideology; individuals associated with groups such as Sanatan Sanstha and related circles emerged in the investigation. Authorities also examined links between her assassination and the killings of other Indian rationalists and secular intellectuals, including Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi. Her murder became emblematic of the growing risks faced by independent journalists and critical thinkers in India. Gauri Lankesh represented an autonomous, secular, outspoken female voice rooted in India’s democratic tradition yet in direct confrontation with sectarian and authoritarian tendencies. Her assassination was not an isolated act but a targeted attack against a journalist who used her work as an instrument of public accountability and political scrutiny. I publish this series to remember that freedom, dignity and justice are never gifts but achievements paid for by real human lives. Behind every right there are names, faces and broken histories. I publish these works to oppose the normalization of political violence and propaganda, to speak to younger generations, and to affirm that silence always serves unchecked power. This is not passive commemoration; it is active memory, a conscious choice, a form of resistance.
Saint-Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601,911 residents as of 2021, with more than 6.4 million people living in the metropolitan area. Saint-Petersburg is the fourth-most populous city in Europe, the most populous city on the Baltic Sea, and the world's northernmost city of more than 1 million residents.
The Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments constitute a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Saint Petersburg is home to the Hermitage, one of the largest art museums in the world, the Lakhta Center, the tallest skyscraper in Europe, and was one of the host cities of the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Euro 2020.
The name day of Peter I falls on 29 June, when the Orthodox Church observes the memory of apostles Peter and Paul. The consecration of the small wooden church in their names (its construction began at the same time as the citadel) made them the heavenly patrons of the Peter and Paul Fortress, while Saint Peter at the same time became the eponym of the whole city. When in June 1703 Peter the Great renamed the site after Saint Peter, he did not issue a naming act that established an official spelling; even in his own letters he used diverse spellings, such as Санктьпетерсьбурк (Sanktpetersburk), emulating German Sankt Petersburg, and Сантпитербурх (Santpiterburkh), emulating Dutch Sint-Pietersburgh, as Peter was multilingual and a Hollandophile. The name was later normalized and russified to Санкт-Петербург (Saint-Petersburg).
The historic architecture of Saint-Petersburg's city centre, mostly Baroque and Neoclassical buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries, has been largely preserved; although a number of buildings were demolished after the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, during the Siege of Leningrad and in recent years. The oldest of the remaining building is a wooden house built for Peter I in 1703 on the shore of the Neva near Trinity Square. Since 1991 the Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast have been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Renfe Viajeros S.A. (grupo Renfe Operadora): la UT 463-199 entra en la estación de Soto de Rey, realizando un tren de Cercanías hacia Oviedo. Esta UT fue construida con solo dos coches (numerada como 462-099), y durante un tiempo fue utilizada por el fabricante CAF como tren de investigación de desarrollos tecnológicos propios. En el año 2009 se le añadió un remolque intermedio, pasando a formar parte de la serie 463, y normalizándose con el resto de la serie.
Renfe Viajeros S.A. (Renfe Operadora group): the EMU 463-199 enters the Soto de Rey station, working a Cercanías train to Oviedo. This EMU was built with only two cars (numbered 462-099), and for a time it was used by the manufacturer CAF as a research train for its own technological developments. In 2009 an intermediate trailer was added, becoming part of the 463 series, and normalizing with the rest of the series.
Anima Series 6
Lismore NSW Australia 2025
HUMANITY 101
When we communicate with someone through a social network, we’re already disconnected from them physically.
We’re not in each other’s physical presence to experience the tone of their voice, their body language and gestures, their personal energy – but at least there’s ‘someone’ on the other end of the line.
Yet when the other person uses an AI to communicate, there’s a double layer of disconnect.
No longer are we indirectly sharing with or responding to another human being, but instead we’re indirectly talking to their program!
And here’s the rub -
Once we normalize communicating via AI, the last vestige of human contact disappears altogether and is replaced by an automated proxy.
It’s not thoughts and feelings typed directly by hand into a keyboard we’re dealing with, but a language model that mimics human behaviour through a probability distribution algorithm that predicts a likely human response.
There’s no beating heart at the other end of the phone line, no lived history, no physical encounter of the world – just a set of mathematical instructions.
Speaking for myself, I’d rather communicate with a real person.
I’d rather invest my valuable time and energy with a fellow biology rather than with a soulless machine – however clever.
Why?
Because I value humanity. I value our physical existence and the opportunity to share that experience with likeminded souls.
It’s what being human is all about – reaching out to someone, not some ‘thing’.
About the Target
Messier 16, also known as the NGC 6611, and is associated with the popular names of :The Eagle Nebula", "The Star Queen Nebula", "The Spire", and lets not forget its most famous feature "The Pillars of Creation". It is a diffuse emission nebula associated with a star cluster in the constellation of Serpens. It is located about 5700 light years away.
Wikipedia tells us the following about the Pillars of Creation:
"Images produced by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen using the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 greatly improved scientific understanding of processes inside the nebula. One of these became famous as the "Pillars of Creation", depicting a large region of star formation. Its small dark pockets are believed to be protostars (Bok globules). The pillar structure resembles that of a much larger instance in the Soul Nebula of Cassiopeia, imaged with the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2005[ equally characterized as "Pillars of Star Creation". or "Pillars of Star Formation".[11] These columns – which resemble stalagmites protruding from the floor of a cavern – are composed of interstellar hydrogen gas and dust, which act as incubators for new stars. Inside the columns and on their surface astronomers have found knots or globules of denser gas, called EGGs ("Evaporating Gaseous Globules"). Stars are being formed inside some of these.
X-ray images from the Chandra observatory compared with Hubble's "Pillars" image have shown that X-ray sources (from young stars) do not coincide with the pillars, but rather randomly dot the nebula. Any protostars in the pillars' EGGs are not yet hot enough to emit X-rays.
Evidence from the Spitzer Telescope originally suggested that the pillars in M16 may be threatened by a "past supernova". Hot gas observed by Spitzer in 2007 suggested they were already – likely – being disturbed by a supernova that exploded 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. Due to the distance the main blast of light would have reached Earth for a brief time 1,000 to 2,000 years ago. A more slowly moving, theorized, shock wave would have taken a few thousand years to move through the nebula and would have blown away the delicate pillars. However, in 2014 the pillars were imaged a second time by Hubble, in both visible light and infrared light. The images being 20 years later provided a new, detailed account of the rate of evaporation occurring within the pillars. No supernova is evidenced within them, and it is estimated in some form they still exist – and will appear for at least 100,000 more years."
About the Project
I don't know about you, but Messier 16 - The Eagle Nebula is one of my Favorite objects in the sky. I think it started when I first saw the "Pillars of Creation" shot by the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1995.
www.nasa.gov/image-feature/the-pillars-of-creation
That incredible image impressed me for a long time, so when I first started my astrophotographic journey 2019, it was one of the first targets I went after. It was a pretty crude image but I could see the "eagle" so I was pretty happy with it. Last summer I revisited M16, capturing images over two nights (a first for me at the time) and I processed it with Pixinsight - which I was just learning - and got a results that was a distinct improvement. At the time - a One-Shot-Color Camera was what I had, so no Hubble Palette for me. I upped my game by gathering more subs and experimented with more sophisticated processing techniques.
This Year's Capture
But this year - I was really psyched to try m16 for a third time. This time I had a telescope platform with a slightly longer focal length and I had a brand new ASI 2600MM-Pro Mono setup - so for the first time, I would be able to shoot with Narrowband and use the Hubble Palette to render the image in away similar to seen in that first Hubble image.
Then we hit Rochester's Monsoon Season of 2021……
I began this project back on the Fourth of July and took a 2.5 hours of subs before having to shut down. Given my site's tree line, I only have about a 3 hour window where I can shoot any given target. With some luck, 3 or 4 more nights should do it and I would have - I hoped - a wonderful image.
Since then I have set my gear up twice to try and capture more subs, only to be shutdown by the clouds. Finally - on Wednesday the 14th, ClearOutside suggested I had an opening. Gary Optiz - who is not only an accomplished astrophotographer but also a real weather wiz, warned me that we would be in the smoke plume from the forest fires out west and that would certainly impact imaging. The Moon was also up as well, but not too bad yet. This would be about my last opportunity to shoot for this project this year, so I had to go for it. The captures seemed to go well but the sky transparency was very bad due to the smoke and because of the high humidity (dew was forming on the scope tubes and running off in streams!)
The Resulting Data
When I looked at the data the next day - I could see that I would have some processing challenges. First I had way fewer frames than I wanted (the story of my life!). When I scanned all of my frames with Blink I found about 25% of them had some evidence of very thin clouds passing through the frame. This would normally would cause me to cull these images before stacking - but I had so few frames this time - I was very reluctant to do so. I really fought hard for those frames and I wanted to get some value from them.
The Processing
The problem here is that the impacted images had very different gradients depending on when they were taken. This would cause what would look like a higher variance for a given pixel when sampled across the subs. This would raise havoc with the rejection algorithms and would cause the final pixel values to be off. I have been hearing about a new script in Pixinsight called NormaliseScaleGradients that does something kind of cool. After calibration and registration, you pick a reference frame and each sub is normalized to the gradient seen in THAT reference frame. This effectively removes arbitrary differences due to thin clouds, stray lights and such. Now that all of the subs look more similar - the rejection algorithms can work more effectively and the image integration can now use more subs - weighted by their noise profiles. This suggests that even pretty bad frames can add some useful data to the final integrated results.
So I keep most of the bad images in the mix, they had their gradients normalized, and they were included in the final master image, weighted by noisy they were compared to other images.
Anything that lets you keep hard-fought subs into the mix is my friend!
I also had a problem where the size of the stars were a function of when I took the images. Narrowband stars always look a little funky anyways- and this was certainly not going to help.
So processing took a lot of time. I was very careful to maximize what I could with deconvolution and I was also able to shrink some of the star sizes using the deconvolution function by taking the point spread function model created by PFSImage and trimming the outer edges a bit before application. I picked up this type from a video by Adam Bock and it did help shrink the images. But I still had mismatched between the filter channels so I spent a lot of time with star masks trying to help things out. And I did help things a bit - they were much better than when I started, but having said that - don't look to carefully at the stars in this image as they the are still a mess!
Capture Information
Lights Frames
• 18 x 300 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, Gain 100.0, Astronmiks 6nm Ha Filter
• 14 x 300 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, Gain 100.0, Astronmiks 6nm OIII Filter
• 15 x 300 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C, Gain 100.0, Astronmiks 6nm SII Filter
• Total of 3.9 hours
Cal Frames
• 30 Darks at 300 seconds, bin 1x1, -15C, gain 100
• 25 Dark Flats at Flat exposure times, bin 1x1, -15C, gain 100
• Flats done separately for each evening to account for camera rotator variances:
○ 25 Ha Flats
○ 25 OIII Flats
○ 25 SII Flats
Capture Hardware
Scope: Astrophysics 130mm Starfire F/8.35 APO refractor
Guide Scope: Televue 76mm Doublet
Camera: ZWO AS2600mm-pro with ZWO 7x36 Filter wheel with ZWO LRGB filter set,
and Astronomiks 6nm Narrowband filter set
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini
Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2
Camera Rotator: Pegasus Astro Falcon
Mount: Ioptron CEM60
Polar Alignment: Polemaster camera
Software
Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller
Image Processing: Pixinsight, Photoshop - assisted by Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second guessing, editor regret and much swearing…..
01 April 2018
Its into the 9th year since I shot this and the situation in the DTES has only deteriorated. Governments have worsened the situation by piling more social housing in the area adding to the “customers with no cash” syndrome. The area is named “Canada’s poorest postal code” by activists and the poverty pimps love the situation making the area one of “Canada’s richest postal codes”, the only differenence being the pimp money goes home at night. Helpful groups support too many by offering them food daily with zero obligation. Its become an impossible sitiuation to address given the current state of political governance.
I wish this was just a sick April Fools Day joke but unfortuantely not.
Sleeping on a sidewalk in the Downtown East Side (DTES) of Vancouver BC takes on a different sense of survival than is observed in many west side sleepers. A combination of mental issues, drug sale and use, area resident poverty and the resulting community of "Customers With No Cash" combine for a perfect locale to take advantage of people on the edge where living is not comparable to what most of us bring to mind in our own comfortable world. Prostitution and drugs are a large part of this community. One can not help feel sorry and remorseful this exists in self important Vancouver.
The irony of this photo is it was shot about 10 feet from the entrance of BC Housing's recently opened Orange Hall office (open 10 am to 4 pm Monday to Friday) 297 Hastings Street at Gore Ave. This situation has steadily gone downhill since the Federal Governemt cut back funding for social housing.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH:
From BC Housing website:
October 3rd, 2014
VICTORIA – The B.C. government is strengthening the non-profit housing sector by transferring provincially-owned properties to non-profit housing providers.
The Province owns approximately 350 parcels of land throughout British Columbia that are currently leased long-term to non-profit housing providers who own and operate social housing buildings on these properties.
The non-profit housing sector has been asking for this step for many years. Having ownership of the land will improve a non-profit’s ability to support better long-term planning and selfsufficiency. Owning the lands they operate on will also help non-profits secure the financing they need to be sustainable.
In order to transfer title, the Province will end these leases, and then transfer ownership of the land to the societies. The properties will be transferred at fair market value. The Province will assist the societies to secure mortgages on the properties. The current operating agreement that BC Housing has with each non-profit society will remain in place. Approximately 115 properties will be transferred by March 31, 2015, and the rest will be transferred over the next three years.
In addition, the Province is looking to transfer ownership of two properties currently managed by BC Housing to non-profit societies. The Province will begin the process by posting Expressions of Interest for Nicholson Tower and Stamps Place in Vancouver shortly.
Tenants will not be impacted by these transfers, and the amount of affordable housing stock will remain stable. Non-profit societies have been providing social housing in B.C. for more than 60 years. Today more than 90% of social housing is managed by non-profit societies.
THE GLOBE & MAIL:
FRANCES BULA
VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Oct. 13 2014
Vancouver won’t solve street homelessness until both the city and province focus on targeting the limited supply of expensive social housing to those who need it most, say experts.
That means help can’t go to anyone who passes through a shelter or an outdoor camp or even to someone who sleeps outside temporarily. In the vast majority of cases, people who become homeless experience it briefly and are able to avoid losing housing again.
But people working on eliminating homelessness do not always understand that the thousands of people who experience homelessness in a year don’t all need expensive subsidized housing. That should be reserved for the chronically homeless, who are not sufficiently helped by temporary assistance with rent or other social supports.
“For nearly 90 per cent of people counted as homeless, they’ll get themselves out of homelessness on their own,” says Tim Richter, who led Calgary’s 10-year plan to end homelessness and is now the president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness. “It’s critical to set priorities. It shouldn’t be first-come, first-served.”
One of the region’s most experienced homelessness researchers, former Vancouver city-hall staffer Judy Graves, said the city is reaping the results of city and provincial staff not always setting the right priorities for the past six years. This past winter, Vancouver still had a count of 533 people sleeping outside (less than in 2008, but more than in 2011), even though the province and city have opened up thousands of new social-housing units rented at welfare-level rates.
It’s an issue that is returning to haunt Vision Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, who promised in 2008 to end street homelessness by 2015, during this fall’s civic-election campaign.
His administration, which has pushed the issue non-stop since he was first elected, has recently exceeded previous efforts by jumping last month into paying for all the costs of converting a downtown Quality Inn to transitional housing, as well as all the costs of a new shelter nearby. Usually the province covers the majority of costs for both of those kinds of housing.
But Ms. Graves said even that unusual effort, accompanied by several hundred other new provincial units about to open, isn’t going to solve the problem by January, 2015.
That’s because the province is only committed to using half of the incoming housing units for the chronically homeless. And city staff also don’t always correctly identify who is the most in need.
“Both the city and province have bought into housing by wait lists,” said Ms. Graves. “It just can’t work. You have to work as though you’re in a disaster zone.”
She said she had doubts that the majority of people who camped in Oppenheimer Park over the summer were homeless, but they got priority for the scarce number of rooms available.
As well, in the early stages of the province’s big social-housing construction push, which will see 14 towers completed with around 1,400 units by the end, non-profit operators were simply moving people from residential hotel rooms into the new buildings.
That meant the housing didn’t go to the chronically homeless and the most in need, but worse, it then allowed landlords in the residential hotels to do renovations, raise rents, or refuse new low-income tenants once the former tenants were relocated to social housing.
That then reduced the overall number of private, low-cost housing units in the city. Ms. Graves said the whole region is experiencing an acute shortage of those kinds of private units now. It has become a game of musical chairs for housing-outreach workers to get a low-cost unit for someone trying to get out of shelters or off the street, she said.
All cities are grappling with constant pressures that create more homelessness at the front end: low working-class incomes that can’t keep up with gentrification and rising rents key among them, said Ms. Graves. That has left cities trying to solve the problem at the back end, trying to house all the people made homeless as a result of many larger forces.
24 HRS VANCOUVER - 16 OCT 14
16 Oct 2014 24 Hours VancouverJANE DEACON Comment at vancouver.24hrs.c
Laura Dilley, PACE Society Action Week, PACE plans to draft housing recommendations for city council before the coming election.
“Oftentimes we will create housing models not including the voices of those we would be housing,” said Dilley.
Rising rent prices that force people out of SROs is a significant factor, as well as landlords who refuse to rent to sex workers out of legal concerns, said Dilley. Low- income housing conditions that require tenants stay in at night or guests to sign in are also significant barriers. She estimates between 10 to 15% of sex workers fall under the category of “survival” or street- based prostitution. For that vulnerable population, simply switching professions is often not an option, said Dilley.
“They’re really forced and entrenched to continuously do that work because they have no options out of it, because we have such stigma in our society that they can’t seek help, they can’t find affordable housing, so they’re really stuck in that situation,” she said.
17 April 2019:
B.C. drug users demand clean supply, but fear they won’t live to see it happen
By David P. BallStar Vancouver
Tues., April 16, 2019
VANCOUVER—Several hundred Vancouverites marked three years since the province declared a public health emergency over the thousands of people killed by overdoses.
But as they marched Tuesday from the safe-injection clinic Insite through downtown Vancouver, advocates say “contaminated” drugs have taken a toll on their own leaders.
For B.C. Association of People on Methadone member Garth Mullins, the losses are mounting, and it’s been destabilizing and “disorganizing” for the drug-reform movement.
“We’ve lost rank and file members and leaders in such high numbers over the last five years,” he said, wearing a distinctive black case of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone on his belt. “It’s hard to organize or think strategically when you’re always doing triage, planning a memorial.”
Just last month the president of his organization, Chereece Keewatin, died from a fentanyl overdose. Mullins knew Keewatin for at least six years, and invited her to join the editorial board of the podcast Crackdown, of which he is executive producer.
“Chereece was really little, but she had this tremendous capacity to lift people’s spirits,” he said in an interview. “You’d have meetings where we talk about really, really bleak subjects, but she had these funny asides to cut through the bleakness.
“She made people laugh. In that way, she took responsibility for the whole collective emotional state of the group.”
It’s not just the B.C. Association of People on Methadone that’s seen the direct “casualties” of what Mullins called “a war.” The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and the national Canadian Association of People who Use Drugs have also lost high-ranking board members in recent years.
Since 2016, nearly 11,000 people have died across Canada from opioid overdoses, according to the most recent federal and provincial data. The majority of those deaths were from opioids such as fentanyl or its more deadly variants, but B.C. remains the epicentre for roughly a third of those deaths, 1,500 of them last year alone.
On average, four British Columbians died every day from overdoses last year, much higher than the national average and largely unchanged since the province’s April 2016 declaration of a public health emergency.
11 May 2020
.
A wall mural in the DTES poses a valid question, "how do we end the drug crisis"? A more basic question, how did we get here?
Vancouver, B.C. is consistently ranked at the top of the list for the world’s most liveable cities - but not for many in the DTES.
The city has a dirty little secret that it has been trying to suppress for decades. The historic four-block area near East Hastings and Main Street — the DTES — known as one of the “poorest postal codes” in Canada, has a combination of drug use, HIV, homelessness, prostitution, mental illness, and crime all making up this poor off neighbourhood.
To be successful as a drug lord you need a steady, reliable, cheap supply of product, a location where you can operate relatively free from prosecution and away you go. The prime location ingredients Vancouver offers is the DTES.
Over the decades continuing city administrations have built a community of “customers with no cash” by loading the DTES with blocks of not for profit social housing. Along with the myriad of Single Room Occupancy hotels (SRO's) the area is prime territory for the drug trade.
Social housing should be spread throughout the city to provide a society of different financial means for common support - IMO.
Administrations over the years have been loath to attempt social housing in the rich city enclaves due to onerous push back. It was and still is more expedient to keep adding more social housing in the DTES where there is minimal opposition.
***** Today there are at least 6 City of Vancouver development permit applications on file for more social housing in the DTES.
The process is welcomed by the myriad of DTES support service groups who like their clientele close at hand and the clientele are fine with it as services are nearby.
DTES government and service support groups along with poverty pimp lawyers who have a hissy fit if anyone tries to change the dial, while also making money off the situation, has resulted in the perfect condition for drug dealers to flourish.
Social housing residents, many older, Asian and often mentally challenged are living in a hell hole neighbourhood with little individual voice.
In recent years, the area is seeing an east creeping gentrification. This is causing the DTES street population to be squeezed into a smaller footprint resulting in more confrontation and the appearance of a worsening situation even though overall the numbers of street people remains fairly constant.
The amount of taxpayer dollars spent in the area is staggering with little to show for the investment.
Vancouver has always had a drug problem. The opioids of choice — and the increasingly staggering death toll — have changed over the years.
In 2017 Fentanyl killed so many Canadians it caused the average life expectancy in B.C. to drop for the first time in decades. But for crime kingpins, it became a source of such astonishing wealth it disrupted the Vancouver-area real estate market.
SOME BACKGROUND:
Excerpt from the Province Newspaper by reporter Randy Shore 18 March, 2017.
When members of the Royal Commission to Investigate Chinese and Japanese Immigration came to Vancouver in 1901, they got an eyeful.
“There were whole rooms of Chinese lying stretched out on beds with the opium apparatus laid out before them — all unmindful that their attitudes and surrounding conditions are being taken note of to assist in keeping the remainder of their countrymen entirely out of Canada,” reported the Vancouver World newspaper.
The fringes of Vancouver’s Chinatown have always been the centre of Canada’s opiate trade. Ever more potent and easily smuggled versions emerged through the decades, culminating in the scourge of synthetic opiates — fentanyl and carfentanil — thousands of times more powerful and many times more deadly than opium.
Opium was a source of revenue for governments of the day. A federal duty imposed on importers fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars between 1874 and 1899. In B.C. ports, and cities charged hundreds of dollars to purveyors in the form of business licences.
Between 1923 and 1932, more than 700 Chinese men were deported for drug-related violations.
Under constant pressure from the police, opium users began to inject their hit, as the technique created no smoke or aroma and used smaller equipment, which could be easily hidden. In the 1920s and 1930s, white users tended to be young criminals, “racetrack hands, and circus and show people” who smoked opium or sniffed heroin.
By the mid-1930s, heroin was one of the most common drugs in circulation and white users were increasingly taking the drug intravenously, especially as prices rose due to scarcity brought about by vigorous law enforcement.
The outbreak of the Second World War put opiate addicts into a state of crisis, as opiate drugs were required in great quantities for the war wounded. The street price of a hit — whether heroin, morphine or codeine — shot up and crime along with it.
In the post-war period, right through to the mid-’60s, Vancouver was ground zero for Canada’s intravenous drug scene, made up mainly of petty criminals, troubled youths fed by drug lords.
Before the ’40s were over, highly refined white heroin had appeared and it was coming from overseas to satisfy a hungry market in Vancouver, home to half of the country’s drug users.
Heroin use remained a constant undercurrent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside during the ’70s and ’80s, even as alcohol was the neighbourhood’s real drug of choice.
But a flood of a new and even more potent “China White” heroin arriving into the city reignited public outrage in the early ’90s. A spate of 331 overdose deaths in 1993 spurred B.C. coroner Vince Cain to call for the decriminalization of heroin and addicts be prescribed the drug to legally maintain their habit.
It would be nearly 15 years before the Study to Assess Long-term Opioid Maintenance Effectiveness (SALOME) began in Vancouver, just about the time a new threat emerged.
Up to 80 times as powerful as heroin, fentanyl hit the streets and reduced the risk for traffickers as it was so concentrated, transportation was easier.
The carnage wrought by fentanyl has been without precedent.
Heroin seized in drug busts is routinely cut with fentanyl and in recent months the presence of carfentanil.
SUMMARY:
Where will this go next, who knows ?
The richest of societies should be especially judged by how they treat their least fortunate, and Vancouver has its challenge set out for the foreseeable future.
UPDATE 23 MAY 2020 - VANCOUVER SUN
John Mackie: The Downtown Eastside is a war zone disaster — stop ghettoizing it.
John Mackie, Vancouver Sun 23 May 2020
Twenty years ago local musician Kuba Oms was recording at the Miller Block, a now defunct Hastings Street recording studio near Save-On-Meats.
He jaywalked and was stopped by a cop, who handed him a ticket.
“I said ‘Are you kidding me?’” Oms recounts. “You know there’s a guy shooting up over there, and a crack dealer over there. And the cop said ‘That’s a health issue.’”
That story pretty much sums up the city’s attitude toward the Downtown Eastside over the past few decades.
In some ways the cop was right — it is a Vancouver health issue. But letting people openly do drugs in public and turn Hastings and the wider Downtown Eastside into a ghetto is political correctness gone mad.
Drive down Hastings Street between Abbott and Gore and you’ll see dozens, even hundreds of people hanging out on the street, in various states of sobriety. They are definitely not social distancing. It’s a miracle that COVID-19 hasn’t swept the entire area.
The height of this madness was the recent occupation of Oppenheimer Park. Vancouver has real issues of homelessness, but to some degree Oppenheimer was about a fringe group of politicos manipulating the homeless.
Many police resources were diverted to the park and there was a crime wave in nearby Chinatown — one business closed because they were being robbed a dozen times a day.
The province recently made hotel rooms available for the homeless people occupying Oppenheimer Park, so things have calmed down somewhat. But the big question is what happens in a few months? Is government going to find permanent homes for them?
Odds are if they do, it will be in highrises in the Downtown Eastside. For decades that’s where the city and province have been concentrating social housing, especially for the mentally ill and drug addicted.
Their argument is these residents feel comfortable there. But the reality is the more poverty is concentrated, the worse the area seems to become.
Maybe it’s time for the city of Vancouver to give its head a shake and realize that its much-ballyhooed Downtown Eastside Plan is actually part of the problem, not the solution.
Part of the plan decrees you can’t build condos on Hastings between Carrall Street in Gastown and Heatley Avenue in Strathcona, or in historic Japantown around Oppenheimer Park.
Development in those areas has to be rental only, with at least 60 per cent social housing. This pretty much ensures that no market housing is built in the poorest area of the city.
When the plan was unveiled in 2014, Vancouver’s former head planner Brian Jackson said the aim was to ensure that low-income people in the Downtown Eastside weren’t displaced.
“The plan is attempting to achieve balance,” he explained then.
In fact, the plan does the exact opposite. There is no balance in the Downtown Eastside: It’s been turned into a ghetto. A friend who’s worked there for two decades calls it a war zone.
The city desperately need some market housing, co-ops and development on Hastings and around Oppenheimer. The anti-poverty activists will scream blue murder that it’s gentrification, but it’s actually normalization. You don’t have to displace anybody, you just have add a different mix to make it safer.
I live in Strathcona, where about 6,500 people live in social housing and about 3,500 in market homes. It’s a close-knit neighbourhood that has the balance Brian Jackson was taking about — it’s diverse and features a variety of incomes.
Japantown and the Downtown Eastside could be a real neighbourhood again if the city retained its stock of handsome historic buildings but allowed some development of its many non-descript structures.
It could be like Strathcona, even the West End. But I fear it could get even worse, if the planners and politicians continue to concentrate all the Lower Mainland’s poverty and social ills in one small area.
jmackie@postmedia.com
John Mackie is a veteran Postmedia reporter who has written several stories about Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Plan.
13 JULY, 2020
Vancouver can’t catch up to its housing crisis
ADRIENNE TANNER
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED 13 JULY 2020
It is obvious now the cheers that erupted when Vancouver’s longest running tent city was dismantled were wildly premature. Fearing a COVID-19 outbreak would take hold in the overcrowded inner-city camp, the provincial government in April acquired emergency housing in hotels for homeless people living there and cleared the site.
Many camp residents embraced the offer of a clean room. Some refused and relocated outdoors. The camp shifted, first to some empty Port of Vancouver land, and when a court order quickly shut it down, finally landed in Strathcona Park. With each move, it grew.
Today there are about 150 tents Strathcona Park, roughly double the number there were in Oppenheimer Park. How many inhabitants are truly homeless is anyone’s guess. Some of the tents were erected by activists with homes. Others belong to people living in single room occupancy hotels, the worst of which are noisy, bug-infested and so hot that some residents prefer to spend summer outside.
There is already an air of permanence to the camp; the city has installed porta-potties, fresh drinking water and handwashing stations. Park rangers drop by a few times daily. The area is reasonably clean, but these are early days.
Strathcona residents are largely sympathetic to homeless people, but are understandably unhappy about losing a large chunk of park space. They fear the same violence and social disorder that cropped up at Oppenheimer is inevitable; there has already been a small fire and there appears to be a bike chop shop on site. There are cries for the city to sanction a permanent tent city location – elsewhere, of course.
So how exactly did the province’s efforts to shut down a tent city and house homeless people backfire so badly? The city and provincial officials have been out-manoeuvered and out-organized by anti-poverty activists who seized a COVID-19 opportunity when they saw it.
The pandemic raised fears the Oppenheimer tent city would turn into a reservoir of disease that could overwhelm the health system. The activists know that’s why the government cleared the camp and purchased hotels for social housing. They understand this is the moment to highlight society’s failure to solve homelessness, even if their end goals seem to differ. Some are calling for permanent housing – others prefer the idea of a permanent, free-wheeling tent city.
The sorry truth is, even with the addition of 600 units of temporary modular housing and, more recently, the purchase of three downtown hotels, there are still more homeless people than homes. Successions of governments at all levels have allowed this crisis to grow. They’ve failed to build enough social housing. Failed to provide adequate mental health services. Failed to fund enough drug rehabilitation programs for those who want to quit and provide a safe drug supply for those who can’t.
So, now here we are with the largest homeless camp the city has ever seen and another stressed-out neighbourhood. Legally, the new tent city may prove more difficult to dismantle – it’s a large park and the tents are well spaced so the pandemic may not wash as a valid reason. And unless housing is available for everyone who is homeless, it is unlikely the courts would grant an injunction.
Solving problems associated with homelessness is a huge challenge. We can start with housing, but that alone is not nearly enough. Many of the people living in the hotels and park are drug users. Many are mentally ill. Some are both. It takes money – and lots of it – to provide decent housing and supports for this segment of society.
But to cave to demands for a permanent tent city is an American-style admission of defeat. The park board seems resigned to tent cities in parks and is considering a bylaw seeking to control locations. City council has resisted sanctioning a permanent spot, instead offering up land for new social housing. The province has stepped up with money for temporary modular housing and purchases of hotels.
It will be tough to keep neighbourhoods onside if more parks are rendered unusable for recreation. There is only one palatable solution; the provincial government must stay the course and keep adding decent, affordable housing. It won’t be cheap or easy. Catchup never is.
01 APRIL 2022
More than 2,200 British Columbians lost to illicit drugs in 2021
The toxic illicit drug supply claimed the lives of at least 2,224 British Columbians in 2021, according to preliminary data released by the BC Coroners Service.
“Over the past seven years, our province has experienced a devastating loss of life due to a toxic illicit drug supply,” said Lisa Lapointe, chief coroner. “This public health emergency has impacted families and communities across the province and shows no sign of abating. In 2021 alone, more than 2,200 families experienced the devastating loss of a loved one. In the past seven years, the rate of death due to illicit drug toxicity in our province has risen more than 400%. Drug toxicity is now second only to cancers in B.C. for potential years of life lost. We cannot simply hope that things will improve. It is long past time to end the chaos and devastation in our communities resulting from the flourishing illicit drug market, and to ensure, on an urgent basis, access across the province to a safe, reliable regulated drug supply.”
The last two months of 2021 saw the largest number of suspected illicit drug deaths ever recorded in the province, with 210 deaths in November and an additional 215 in December. The 2,224 total number of deaths is 26% more than the 1,767 illicit drug-related deaths investigated by the BC Coroners Service in 2020, and equates to an average of 6.1 lives lost every day.
The provincewide death rate in 2021 was 42.8 per 100,000 residents. Every health authority in B.C. experienced a record loss of lives.
Since the public health emergency into substance-related harms was first declared in April 2016, more than 8,800 British Columbians have been lost to toxic drugs.
Toxicological testing once again underscores the reality that the illicit drug supply continues to be unstable and increasingly toxic. Fentanyl was detected in 83% of samples tested in 2021. Carfentanil was present in 187 results, almost triple the number recorded in 2020 (66).
Additionally, 50% of samples in December tested positive for etizolam, more than three times the rate of detection in July 2020 (15%). Benzodiazepines create significant challenges for life-saving efforts as naloxone does not reverse its effects. As with previous reporting, almost all test results included the presence of multiple substances.
“We need decision-makers at all levels to recognize and respond to this public health emergency with the level of urgency it demands,” Lapointe said. “The reality is this: every day we wait to act, six more people will die. COVID-19 has shown what is possible when goverments act decisively to save lives. And in order to save lives in this public-heath emergency, we need to provide people with access to the substances they need, where and when they need them. Time has run out for research and discussion. It is time to take action.”
Additional key preliminary findings are below. Data is subject to change as additional toxicology results are received:
In 2021, 71% of those who died as a result of suspected drug toxicity were between 30 to 59, and 78% were male.
The townships that experienced the highest number of illicit drug toxicity deaths in 2021 were Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria.
By health authority, in 2021, the highest numbers of illicit drug toxicity deaths were in the Fraser and Vancouver Coastal health authorities (765 and 615 deaths, respectively), making up 62% of all such deaths during this period.
By health authority, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Vancouver Coastal Health (49 deaths per 100,000 individuals) and Northern Health (48 per 100,000).
By Health Service Delivery Area, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Vancouver, Thompson Cariboo, Northwest, Northern Interior and Fraser East.
By Local Health Area, in 2021, the highest rates of death were in Upper Skeena, Merritt, Enderby, Lillooet and North Thompson.
Quotes:
Dr. Nel Wieman, deputy chief medical officer, First Nations Health Authority –
“The number of deaths due to toxic drug poisonings for 2021 translates to devastating losses of First Nations people: daughters and sons, aunties and uncles, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and grandfathers and grandmothers. These are people who loved and were loved. In every year since this public health emergency was declared, B.C. First Nations people have been over-represented in toxic drug-poisoning events and deaths. We must change our understanding of the root causes of substance use and addiction, and work together to address the stigmas surrounding toxic drug use and the people who use drugs. We must continue to invest in Indigenous-specific, culturally safe harm-reduction, treatment and recovery services that are accessible, timely and free from discrimination and racism.”
Guy Felicella, peer clinical adviser, Vancouver Coastal Health –
“I join the thousands of British Columbians who are heartbroken, frustrated and angry over this unfathomable loss. Every one of these deaths was preventable and represents a failure to act, a failure to learn from mistakes. Change nothing and nothing changes. That’s been the story now for years as the approach throughout this crisis has been to meet policies where they’re at, rather than meeting people who use drugs where they’re at. This approach is killing and continues to kill people. Who has the courage to step forward and make this stop?”
AUGUST 2023
Today’s release of the report on drug toxicity deaths for the month of July 2023 by the BC Coroners Service is a stark reminder that the ongoing toxic-drug crisis continues to have a devastating impact on communities across our province. We hold in our hearts the memories of the 198 people lost in July in British Columbia.
The coroners service said the 1,455 deaths from January to July are the most ever reported in the first seven months of the year since a public health emergency over drug poisoning deaths in the province was declared in 2016.
It puts the province on pace to potentially exceed the 2,383 deaths recorded in 2022. A total of 12,739 people in the province have died from drug overdoses in the seven years.
30 NOVEMBER, 2023
At least 2,039 British Columbians have died from toxic drugs so far this year, according to preliminary figures released by the B.C. Coroners Service on Thursday, 29 November, 2023.
Of those, 189 people died in October, which is about 6.1 deaths a day. Most of the dead were between 30 and 59 years of age, and more than three-quarters were men, according to the coroner.
While the largest number of deaths reported so far has been in urban centres, such as Vancouver, Surrey and Victoria, the health authority with the highest rate of death in 2023 is Northern Health, with 61 deaths per 100,000 residents, according to the coroner.
As in previous months, fentanyl was found in most — 85 per cent — of the illicit drugs tested, often combined with other opioids or stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine.
Earlier this month, Interior Health issued a drug advisory warning for people who use drugs that some substances being advertised as hydromorphone on the black market contain isotonitazine, a drug the coroner says is as potent as fentanyl.
Unregulated drug toxicity is the leading cause of death in B.C. for people aged 10 to 59, accounting for more deaths than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural disease combined, the coroner said.
Since a public health emergency was declared in 2016, more than 13,000 people have died.
JANUARY 2024:
Jennifer Whiteside, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, has released the following statement regarding the BC Coroners Service year-end report on illicit drug toxicity deaths:
“Today, as we reflect on the year behind us, our hearts are heavy with the loss of 2,511 people in British Columbia to toxic drugs. Each of these lives was precious and important, each with their own story, their own dreams and people who love them. They were part of our community, and their loss is felt deeply by us all.
So what is the game plane to stop it?
C. seeks to keep cash seized from Downtown Eastside gang
Courtesy Kim Bolan and the Vancouver Sun.
Kim Bolan is an experienced and award-winning journalist who has covered gangs in British Columbia for the past 40 years. Bolan also investigated the Air India bombing for 25 years until the publication in 2005 of her book, Loss of Faith.
The B.C. government has filed a lawsuit against a group of alleged Downtown Eastside drug traffickers, seeking the forfeiture of more than $150,000 seized from them.
The lawsuit, filed this week by the director of civil forfeiture, names four defendants that it alleges are part of a criminal organization investigated by the Vancouver Police Department.
While the group is not named in the statement of claim, details of the VPD probe outlined in the court document match an investigation into Zone 43 — a gang that originated in Montreal but has taken over the Downtown Eastside in recent years. Zone 43 has connections to B.C.’s notorious Wolfpack gang alliance.
In June, the VPD announced arrests of several Zone 43 gangsters, though they were released pending approval of charges.
The VPD said it had seized firearms, 24 kilos of drugs and $150,000 in cash during searches on May 14 in Vancouver and Burnaby.
The civil forfeiture lawsuit refers to three VPD searches done on the same date in the same cities and alleges Shayne Cozier-Flanagan, Evantee Jevontee Eustace Stoney, Tristin Johnson and Raimon Geday were “participating in the activities of a criminal organization.”
When police searched Stoney’s apartment on the 30th floor at 2388 Madison Ave. in Burnaby, they found $143,910.75 in Canadian currency and $607 in U.S. currency, the lawsuit said.
Officers seized another $5,800 at Cozier-Flanagan’s suite, also on the 30th floor, at 5665 Boundary Rd. in Vancouver, it said.
About $3,417 was seized from Johnson, who also lives in the Madison apartment, when he was arrested in the 300-block of East Hastings. Another $1,920 was found in Geday’s room in a supportive housing building on Kaslo Street, the lawsuit said.
The VPD also seized a 2017 Acura RDX, of which Stoney is the registered owner and which was used “to facilitate the trafficking of controlled substances,” the civil forfeiture director alleged.
The statement of claim notes that both Stoney and Geday have previous trafficking convictions and are banned from possessing firearms.
All four men named in the lawsuit “trafficked in controlled substances in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver and the surrounding areas,” the lawsuit alleges.
In the Boundary apartment, police also found a money counter and business cards with the number to call to purchase drugs — known as a ‘dialer’ number.
In the Madison suite, the VPD also found dilaudid pills, oxycodone pills and “score sheets” documenting drug sales, collection and debts.
In Geday’s room, police found crack cocaine, powdered cocaine, crystal methamphetamine and another 275 dilaudid pills, as well as score sheets, bear spray and “miscellaneous drug packaging materials.”
The cash and car should be forfeited to the government because they are proceeds of or were used for unlawful activity, the lawsuit alleged.
The crimes committed include possession for the purpose of trafficking and trafficking, committing offences for the benefit of a criminal organization, conspiracy, money laundering and failure to declare taxable income, it alleged
No statements of defence have yet been filed on behalf of the four men.
Vancouver Police Insp. Phil Heard said at the June news conference that Zone 43 gangsters “pose a very significant risk to the public. They’re involved in a well-documented conflict ongoing in the province of Quebec with a rival group.”
Sources say the gang is still selling drugs in the Downtown Eastside.
AUGUST 2025:
The law protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair
Pete McMartin: I'm tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse.
Published Aug 03, 2025
In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote a weeklong series of stories identifying the government social welfare programs — and their cost to taxpayers — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
Over 100 programs existed just for housing. Thirty provided health care, 30 offered family services and a miscellany of another 100 services — including a food bank for pets — brought the total to 260 social welfare agencies operating solely within the eight square blocks of the DTES.
Those 260 programs served just 6,500 clients.
Five years earlier, in 2009, Province reporter David Carrigg also did a survey of the programs available in the DTES, and he identified 174 social welfare agencies offering services to about 5,000 clients.
In other words, in the five years between Carrigg’s survey and Culbert’s and mine, not only had the number of people needing help grown but so had the number of agencies serving them.
And the cost to taxpayers?
Over $360 million annually.
That astounding figure — almost a million dollars a day — did little to satisfy the DTES’s voracious appetite for tax dollars. More to the point, it did nothing to eradicate the misery and living conditions of the people who lived there.
Rather than winning the war on poverty — and what a quaint phrase that seems now — governments engineered a truce, with the unstated understanding that if they couldn’t solve the problem or spend their way out of it, they could contain it. Those 260 social service bureaucracies weren’t solutions to an intractable problem; they were barricades. They ghettoized their impoverished clientele by concentrating the services on which they depended.
And let’s be honest: The public was complicit in this, and content for it to continue as long as the misery stayed confined within the borders of the DTES.
And yet here we are. The squalor spreads. It corrodes a once-vibrant downtown core. It infiltrates the suburbs. Daily acts of random violence and vandalism have become normalized, while a cornucopia of drugs — some decriminalized, some tolerated, many deadly — act as accelerants.
In 2016, a year after our survey, provincial health officer Dr. Perry Kendall declared a public health emergency under the Public Health Act due to the alarming rise in opioid-related overdose deaths. Since then, over 16,000 people have died from those opioids. That’s not progress. It’s a plague.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has worked. Over the decades, the problem has been studied to death — admittedly, a poor choice of words — with consultants and academics and the legions of poverty industry advocates offering up solutions that ultimately fail. They fail because they’re predicated on two simple criteria:
1. Give us more money.
2. Give us more of everything — housing, hospital beds, food banks, drugs, injection sites, counselling or — and this is always implicit — empathy, with a side order of collective guilt.
I’ve seen this in my own newspaper.
In one recent opinion piece, the author laments that it has been the public’s and governments’ norm “to daily bypass our downtrodden, our homeless, our addicted or mentally ill on the street as though they are either invisible or merely equivalent to lampposts” — to which I have to reply: ‘Are you f—ng kidding me?’
The public and its governments have done exactly the opposite and, short of bathing their feet with Christ-like piety, have directed billions of tax dollars not only to ease the suffering of the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill, but also to make them completely dependent upon those dollars.
Another Sun story — this one again by Culbert — examined the merits of involuntary care through the experiences of three addicts who underwent the process, and while two saw it as beneficial and helped them get clean, the third condemned it as “dehumanizing” and a cause of her PTSD. Though she no longer does drugs, she said that if she relapses she would prefer to take her chances with street drugs that could possibly kill her rather than be readmitted to hospital against her will.
Well, OK, I thought, ‘You’re an adult. Good for you for having the honesty to express that choice, however idiotic I may find it.’
But what I thought was missing in her testimonial was (a) any appreciation of the monumentally expensive efforts governments and the public had tried to make on her behalf, however ill-informed she may have believed those attempts to be, and (b) her failure to recognize the destructive effects that a relapse would have not just on her own health and family, but, more importantly, also on the collective health of the public, who would be asked to offer up yet more money, and deal yet again with her relapse — providing she survives it.
Finally, in The Sun, there was another column, this one by Sam Sullivan, who wrote that, after 52 years, it was time to end the DTES “experiment” and the restrictive housing policies that he believes led to the homelessness and violence bedevilling it.
Funny thing about that.
Between 1993 and 2005, Sullivan was a Vancouver city councillor, and for three years after that, he was mayor. Yet despite the fact that his 15-year tenure at city hall placed him in the midst of that DTES experiment, if not close to its helm, it is only now, 20 years later, that he publicly declares the experiment to be a failure, and — as far as I could tell from reading his opinion piece — without taking any responsibility for it.
I will refrain here, in my own column, from claiming to speak for the public or with any inkling of what popular sentiment might be.
But this is how I feel:
My patience is Exhausted.
I’m tired of the endless, self-regenerating calls for more studies and more funding when all I see is a colossal waste of money and effort leading to no improvement. I’m tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. I’m tired of civil rights that supersede my own, and treat the right to defecate in the streets with greater regard than my right to be offended by it.
Finally, I’m tired of a social welfare system that not only encourages dependency, but refuses, out of moral timidity, to also admit its complicity in it, and which shies away from asking hard questions about personal responsibility and the consideration of measures more draconian than safe injection sites — measures like a return to complete drug criminalization, a higher threshold of minimum sentences for trafficking, the establishment of rehabilitation centres or work camps exclusively in wilderness areas far from the temptations of cities, the discontinuation of any efforts that facilitate drug use, and yes, the robust expansion of an involuntary care system.
It’s also my opinion that none of these measures, given the current legal climate, will become reality, at least for the foreseeable future. Under our Constitution and the Criminal Code, the law, in its majestic equality, protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair, and, as so often happens, bring about their own deaths.
How enlightened we have become! What progress we have made! We’ve reached that point when now sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing one’s daily bread are no longer evidence of a system’s failure.
They are the system.
This image is about comparing Photoshop processing (my customary tool) of lunar data to PixInsight processing. This image, processed in PixInsight, is rendered from the same data as the Crater Copernicus image processed in Photoshop and posted on 2022-08-22.
My impression of this image is that although it reveals more detail than the one originally posted, there seems to be some remaining softness that can be improved by better seeing and use of a UV-IR cutt filter
After registration and stacking in Autostakkert, all follow on processing to this image was in PixInsight instead of Photoshop.
PixInsight processes used:
ChannelExtraction to pull out separate RGB channel images
LinearFit to normalize channel levels
ColorCombination to reassemble into a single RGB image
UnsharpMask for sharpening
CurvesTransformation for RGB, saturation and CIE c* component stretches
Click on the shot to see it over black background !!!
Frankly speaking I'm an adorer of places like Edessa, because honestly there is a unique, beautiful and interesting shot at almost every place you may cast your glance at !!! It is practically one of the places that can be called a photographer's paradise ...
I honestly believe that it is a mistake to shoot at only alternative views of the main theme ... You should try to search for secondary, minor details that deffinitely exist around a major worth seen event, that make a positive impact on you and try to take them down by setting off the element that hit your eye in the first place !!!
Undoubtedly my friends a successful shot is a shot that initially makes an intense impression on the photographer ... This is, I believe, the third component of a successful photograph (the other two being proper lighting and interesting synthesis) ...
In other words, don't bother to try to impress others with a theme that basically you are not impressed by !!! It's simply not gonna happen !!!!
EXIF: NIKON D90 with Nikon Nikkor 18 - 55 lens, Shutter Speed priority (I was after the long exposure effect of the waterfall), f 32 (a very small f value chosen by D90 in order not so much to define the clarity of DOF but to normalize the exposure of the shot and to compensate for the large shutter speed), ISO 200, focal length 42 mm, manual exposure selection, cloudy weather adjusted white balance, center weighted average light metering mode, use of ND HOYA X2 filter, HDR made by only one original RAW shot with shutter speed 1/4 s, managing to accurately convey the scene's cloudy atmospere's lighting conditions to the viewer, flash didn't go off, no tripod ....
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