It may not seem so to anyone who has never tried to shoot the moon, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get a good lunar shot (never mind deep sky). Talk about dynamic range…! Plus it’s moving fast enough that even a reasonably short shutter speed can still show motion blur.
About my only half-decent moon shot was this one, taken through a 4" (100mm) aperture f/9 semi-Apo refractor, at prime focus:
The scope was on a driven mount, but it was an alt-az mount so it was of limited use for longer exposures. Fortunately with the moon, longer exposures aren’t needed.
My wife and I were driving home from an early eat-out dinner when I noticed the sky was looking nice and partly cloudy / “fall-ish” so I grabbed my camera when I got home and headed back out.
There were some of the most spectacular God-rays shooting out between clouds that I’ve ever seen – Of course, seen through the windshield of my car while en-route, naturally… By the time I got to the site, they were pretty much gone (of course).
But one suddenly poked its head (?) out from a very bright spot in the cloud and I tried to quickly frame up some kind of quasi-composition and shot a couple of 3-frame brackets. Talk about excessive dynamic range!
I processed all three in ART but even with highlight recovery on, whites dropped in Tone Equalizer and Highlight Compression pushed up a bit, there was still a tiny pink fringe. Those highlights were well and truly blown! I was mostly able to remove that with a local adjustment (Color Similarity filter). I then stacked the three shots in Affinity Photo and tried to mask out / in as required to balance things out.
That little hole is still very bright, but at least the rays showed up nicely. Looks like some kind of UFO landing light…
If anyone’s interested, I can post the three as Play Raws.
We have had an incredibly soggy time over the last couple of weeks, with almost continuous rain. During Storm Babet we had 100mm of rain in 8 hours.
All of which has meant that it has been impossible to get out and take pictures of the wonderful autumn colour that we are having this year.
Yesterday, to avoid going stir-crazy, we went to the Lindores Abbey distillery. This is a new distillery, on the site of the oldest recorded occurrence of distilling in Scotland.
Very much record shots, but it was pouring down outside with many flooded fields on the way home.
I could put some in buckets and mark it “Click and collect” if you like…
A couple of things I didn’t say, firstly the pictures were taken with my 14-24mm lens, hence the slightly odd perspective (which I haven’t corrected).
One amusing fact mentioned in the tour, there is a line that divides the Scottish Lowlands from the Highlands, the distillery is just on the Lowland side of the line, while its owner lives just across the Highland side of the line. When the distillery was built, this raised questions about which kind of whisky they should make, the difference being in the way that the barley is dried after germination.
I had really noticed tbh, but now I think about it I should have noticed it was a decently wide lens. My widest is my 24-70… never quite been able to justify wider to myself. For interiors it’s super, but I hardly ever shoot those. Landscapes too, but I’m usually happy with stitching… I find myself hard to convince.
Oh, interesting! Thought it was going to be bad for leaves this year cos I thought you needed a cold snap. Might head up to Pitlochry when I get chance. Wonder where else is good at the moment.
