Night Sky Photography
The Milky Way hangs in the sky over the Gypsum Hills of Kansas.
Last year, I started doing some astrophotography, with means standing around in the pitch black night fumbling with your camera until you figure out how to set up in the dark and get a decent picture. Well, it really means taking pictures of the night sky. It is not an easy thing to get a properly exposed picture, because the earth is in motion and that shows up real fast when you start taking a long exposure. The second big problem is that there are lights everywhere, and they make light pollution that puts a glow in the sky that is very present.
To counter these problems, you can only take an exposure of about 20-25 seconds before the stars begin to blur. With the new large megabyte sensors in the digital cameras this is reduced to more like 10-15 seconds. That doesn’t give you much to work with in terms of clear and clean exposure. The other thing you can do is get a star tracker, which moves the camera opposite to the earth’s rotation so the sky remains stationary. That way you can take long enough exposures to really capture the sky without a lot of excess noise or graininess to the picture.
Regardless of the method you use, processing night shots so they look decent is an art unto itself. An art that I have been studying now for over a year. I recently started to use a star tracker, and the difference that makes is considerable. I have also learned some new techniques for processing and started to revisit some of the shots I made last year that were less than splendid.
The Milky Way over the Bruner homestead land south of Dacoma, Oklahoma.
I went out this week and took a few pictures in the Gypsum Hills, where you are far enough away from lights to have an amazing dark sky. The first picture on here is the only one I have had time to process yet. This was a four-minute long exposure of the foreground, and then I moved away from the tree in the foreground and took a four-minute long exposure of the sky. Then blended the two together. Not perfect, but still learning the techniques.
The second picture is one that I took last year, and was disappointed in how it turned out. I still did not know what to do with it at the time. This morning I revisited the shot and used my new-found knowledge to reprocess it. I am pleased with the result, but I need to retake the picture with long exposures so it could be even better. I have quite a few other pictures that I will go back and reprocess now that I know a bit more.
The picture with the windmill is special for me and I hope for my family as well. This was taken at the northeast corner of the quarter section of land my Grandfather Bert Bruner claimed as homestead when the Cherokee Outlet was opened to settlement in 1894. He moved his family there in 1895, and his father George Bruner claimed the southwest quarter section of the same section of land so the corners of their farms were adjacent. Later, my Great-grandmother Linney inherited some money and bought the southeast quarter. Most of my aunts and uncles, and my mother were born at home right here on this piece of land. Linney Bruner was a midwife, and probably delivered all of them.
