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I've recently downloaded a very helpful free program called Stellarium, which essentially gives you a view of the night sky (stars, constellations, planets, the milky way and other objects) from any location on earth at any time you care to program into it.
Great for me, with my love of watching all things celestial.
With an unusual clear sky forecast for a cold November's night over North Wales, I used Stellarium to find out where the milky way would be so I could choose a good spot from which to view and photograph it.
I got quite excited when I saw that, early in the night, around 7pm, the milky way would be almost directly west.
This meant that if I parked up at one of my favourite viewing spots, the Pen Barras car park on the slopes of Moel Famau in the Clwydian range of mountains near where I live, then the milky way would be pretty much over the market town of Ruthin, situated in the Vale of Clwyd stretched out below my lofty perch.
And so it proved to be, with a lovely night time view of the stars and milky way, unimpeded by the usual clouds that are the norm for this part of the world.
But trying to photograph the scene proved very tricky, as the lights of Ruthin below were far brighter than the faint stars of the milky way overhead, and it was impossible to take a single exposure that captured the detail in the heavens without the artificial lights completely blowing out.
Alternatively, if I exposed for the streetlights then the sky went completely black with no stars to be seen!
In the end I took five separate exposures at a range of ISOs from 100 up to 3200 in the hope that Adobe Lightroom could blend them together as an HDR file that would give me something I could work with in post-processing.
In the end, Lightroom's 'Blend to HDR' function exceeded my somewhat sceptical expectations by a wide margin, giving me a blended DNG file with reasonable details in both the faintly lit sky and brightly lit foreground.
A few tweaks later and I ended up with this great final image when I wasn't hopeful of achieving anything meaningful at all.
This is a technique I'm definitely going to be using again!
Filename - milky way ruthin 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 6D
Lens - 14mm prime
Exposure - 15 secs @ f2.8, ISO100-3200
Location - Ruthin, Vale of Clwyd, North Wales
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - Adobe Lightroom
Comments - HDR blend used to cope with extreme contrast range
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