Auriga

I’m going to need to start a new constellation portrait section to organize these, and the problem is my ability to get good data has outstripped my ability to process them into good images.

I spent October 13, 2020 at Cherry Springs (PA) and while it was not as clear as the night I spent in August, it was far better than anything I’d get within 100 miles or so of my home in Brooklyn, NY. There was a bit of light haze (very light) that was noticeable in that there was a bit of glow around Jupiter and Mars. Of course, that’s actually okay for constellation portraits where, if I had been thinking better, I would have taken my light fog filter to deliberately blur and spread out the star images which helps bring out their intrinsic color. When perfectly focused, they tend to saturate the pixels and all come out pure white.

I have a large number of overlapping frames that I really want to turn into mosaic that spans a big chunk of the Milky Way from at least Cygnus to Auriga, but that’s going to take a while to build up the skills to stitch them together without ending up with contrast lines along the seams. But I’m reasonably happy with this as a first pass. It’s certainly one of my better images for this wide field view.