andyschwartz_3619

Cosmic Mountain Cathedral

Night Sky over St. Catherine of Siena

Night Sky over St. Catherine of Siena
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NIKON D750

settings

Aperture f/1.8 ISO 2000 Shutter 125/1 Focal Length 20/1

location

Estes Park, Colorado, US

upload_date

Aug, 2020

Views

Likes

Awards

Curator's Selection

Spring 21 Award

Treasure Award

Winter Award 2020

Peer Award

Top Choice

Top Ranks

Top 20 rank

Top 10 rank week 1

Top 20 rank

Top 30 rank week 2

Behind The Lens

Location

This photo was taken in the Colorado mountains off of Highway 7 just north of the town of Allenspark and south of the town of Estes Park (gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park). The small stone chapel in the photo is the St. Catherine on the Rock.

Time

This photo was taken on a summer evening around 10 PM.

Lighting

There was no moon at the time of this shot and it was quite dark. Since I was close to the highway, I was fortunate that there was no traffic at that hour of the night. It was quite dark and challenging to compose the photo with the chapel and the night sky.

Equipment

I used a Nikon D750 full frame DSLR with a SIGMA 20mm f1.4 wide angle lens, mounted on a Really Right Stuff tripod.

Inspiration

I took my first night sky photography workshop a year earlier and wanted to find a location that was sufficiently dark to capture the Milky Way in the right spot above the chapel. I used a app on my cell phone called 'Photopills' to plan the shot (it helped me locate the Milky Way based on the location, time, and date).

Editing

I took FIVE identical raw format exposures that I first post-processed in Adobe Lightroom, and then used a program to 'image stack' them called SEQUATOR, for the purpose of reducing the noise in the image from the low light, and long exposure (20 seconds at f2, ISO 2000) and high ISO. This created a new TIF image that I brought back into Lightroom to do a bit more post processing (the resulting image needed to be darkened and the foreground exposure adjusted.

In my camera bag

I keep 3 lenses in my bag: A Nikkor AFS 70-200mm F4 lense, a Nikkor 24-120mm F4 kit lense, and a Nikkor 16-35mm F4 wide/zoom lense, along with 3 extra batteries and extra SD storage cards. I recently purchased a new Nikon Z6ii 24.6 MP full frame mirrorless camera (my D750 will become a backup).

Feedback

This type of photography requires a bit of practice and preparation. Using the Photopills app helped enormously to find the best location/position for the Milky Way and Sequator did a great job on noise reduction using 5 stacked images. I would say take a minimum of 5 images (more would be better to reduce noise even more). I would also look next time at taken additional exposures to 'focus stack' the foreground so it is as sharp as the night sky. I did not take the time to do that with this image.

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andyschwartz_3619

andyschwartz_3619

Cosmic Mountain Cathedral

Night Sky over St. Catherine of Siena

Behind The Lens

See more amazing photos, follow andyschwartz_3619

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