November 8, 2013 at 6:05 am

Picture of the Day: Starry Night

by twistedsifter

 

STARRY NIGHT

 

milky way night sky starts tunnel view yosemite national park

Photograph by JUSTIN KERN
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In this breathtaking 18-picture panorama by Justin Kern, we see the Milky Way Galaxy in the night sky from ‘Tunnel View’ at Yosemite National Park in California. Oh and that bright looking star just to the right of the bottom-middle of the image is Jupiter 🙂

Getting this shot was a complex process that Justin outlines in his Flickr photo description:

“This is a panorama of 18 or so individual images, crudely corrected for exposure individually in Lightroom and Photoshop and then stitched together in a program called PTGui Pro. Each image was taken with my D700 at ISO 6400, 30 sec, 14mm, f/2.8.
 
First, we apply a linear point curve. Great though it is, the 14-24mm f/2.8 at f/2.8 and 14mm exhibits significant light fall-off along the image corners and edges. We now must correct this in Lightroom. Scroll down to find the vignettes adjustments. You’ll see I adjust both the vignette and midpoint sliders. Now we copy these settings and apply them to all images and export each photograph as a TIFF. Now in photoshop we are going to define the black point using the levels adjustment. Use the black dropper tool to select a part of the sky you want to drop all the way to black.
 
You’ll see the sky is now starting to look normal, we now adjust the black, white and gray sliders to “stretch” the image a bit to reproduce it as I best remember it. Here we see the final effect. All that is left to do is to apply these levels to each of the images and stitch them together with a panorama program. I used a Mercator projection so as to keep the Milky Way straight and frame it within the darkened borders of the grand valley.”

 

 

picture of the day button Picture of the Day: Starry Night