Friday, January 15, 2010

15/365 - Stars Over Houghton

Star trails over the city of Houghton.
Click the photo to see it on Flickr.

Tonight's photo is being posted late because I've been out all night taking it! This is one in my continuing attempts at startrail photos -- this one is overlooking my current place of residence (Houghton), and my place of employment (Michigan Tech). Two previous attempts were near here, at the Quincy Mine.

This one is a bit different -- somehow, I happened to compose so that there were no bright stars visible on the left, and only a few on the right. I think that the horizontal line is a plane. Let me know what you think!

Technical details: this photo is a composite image (made with Startrails), "stacked" from 136 separate images. Each image was a 30 second exposure at f/7.1, ISO 200. I then edited the image in Gimp, to bring up the contrast in the sky (the brightness of the city drowned out the stars, so they needed a little boost!).

Final thought: the hills of Houghton don't look nearly as steep from this perspective -- but boy do they suck when it snows!

2 comments:

Summer said...

Gorgeous. A truly breathtaking photo.

Anonymous said...

Beautiful, Dave!

JC