St Mary Lake Milky Way

Kyle Jones

Kyle Jones

Moderator
I captured this a week ago in Glacier on a nice clear night. We did have aurora activity that weekend which I believe is the cause of the purple streak in the sky.

Any thoughts are welcome.

1) Reworked image from scratch using DXO PureRAW to reduce noise
1045 St Mary Lake Stars_1200.jpg


2) Original (noisy) image
1045 St Mary Lake Stars_1200.jpg
 
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AlanLichty

AlanLichty

Moderator
Sweet - I am jealous of your clear air up there. This is a really nice view of the MW with low pollution levels so nice level of clarity to the skies, Hard to go wrong with a foreground like this.
 
JimFox

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
Beautiful Kyle! What a beautiful location to capture the Milky Way from.

There is a bit of what looks like noise in the trees at the bottom. What did you do for Noise Reduction on this? Perhaps darkening the trees a little more will help the noise to retreat into the darkness.

In the sky that looks like what's called "STEVE". It's similar to an aurora but different. It always comes across as a streak of color like in your image.
 
Kyle Jones

Kyle Jones

Moderator
JimFox said:
Beautiful Kyle! What a beautiful location to capture the Milky Way from.

There is a bit of what looks like noise in the trees at the bottom. What did you do for Noise Reduction on this? Perhaps darkening the trees a little more will help the noise to retreat into the darkness.

In the sky that looks like what's called "STEVE". It's similar to an aurora but different. It always comes across as a streak of color like in your image.
Click to expand...
Thanks Jim. STEVE makes a lot of sense - I had never heard of that before. You confirmed what I already concluded about the foreground noise. I have a plan to clean it up, which will include darkening the edges more. The ground layer is a 3 minute exposure at ISO 800 so outside of raising shadows too much, it should be pretty clean.
 
Kyle Jones

Kyle Jones

Moderator
JimFox said:
There is a bit of what looks like noise in the trees at the bottom. What did you do for Noise Reduction on this? Perhaps darkening the trees a little more will help the noise to retreat into the darkness
Click to expand...
I completely reworked the image (in the original post) using DXO PureRAW along with some manual hot spot removal. Both versions used a 3 minute ISO 800 ground exposure and a 25 second ISO 3200 sky exposure.
 
AlanLichty

AlanLichty

Moderator
Kyle Jones said:
I completely reworked the image (in the original post) using DXO PureRAW along with some manual hot spot removal. Both versions used a 3 minute ISO 800 ground exposure and a 25 second ISO 3200 sky exposure.
Click to expand...
I like the new and improved version. Much better details in all of the ground layer elements.
 
JimFox

JimFox

Moderator
Staff member
I like the edit a lot. You cleaned up the ground layer nicely.

I have played with PureRaw some. It does pretty good, though in my image from Colorado and Cinnamon Pass. I shot it darker since the moon would be rising later, and in the dark adjacent mountain sides, it's AI actually created what looks like rice terraces in those recovered dark areas. So it's AI still needs some learning.

But 99% of the time I just use Bridge, pull an image into ACR and then if there is a noise issue, I just click on the Enhanced mode and let it recover the noise. I have found it does a job as good as PureRaw, but it's slower. Though I think it's gotten a recent speed increase. But I would rather just let ACR do it, and it's all in one program.
 
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