paulmp

Eye to the Galaxy

When I was a kid I heard Aristotle's myth about being able to see the stars during the day from the bottom of a deep enough well or ravine. It is a complet...
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When I was a kid I heard Aristotle's myth about being able to see the stars during the day from the bottom of a deep enough well or ravine. It is a complete myth and not possible, but it did get me wondering, what would the night sky look like from the bottom of a ravine or gorge?
This was captured in on of the gorges in Karijini National Park, Western Australia.
Technical details for the inevitable questions and "PHOTOSHOPPED!" accusations:
Canon EOS 5Dmk2
Canon 8-15mm f4 fisheye lens
Camera was set up on a tripod in the bottom of a gorge, pointing pretty close to straight up at the sky. It is two exposures, one for the walls of the cliffs and the other for the sky, they were taken hours apart, but the camera was not moved at all between exposures.
First exposure was about an hour after sunset while the moon was still in the sky, giving some light on the walls. I then waited several hours for the moon to set and the milky way to move over to the right spot and captured that. The second exposure was ISO1600, f4, 50 seconds at 11mm.
The two exposures were then processed in Adobe Lightroom with some minor contrast adjustments, colour correction and lens distortion correction, from there they were taken into Adobe Photoshop and layered over each other, then I created a mask to show the night sky. The image was flattened, some sharpening was applied and then it was saved as a lossless .tiff file. After that I resized the image to a web friendly resolution, changed the colour space to sRGB to be web friendly too and then saved as a jpeg.
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