Ancient Stars

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jadewolf

jadewolf

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bristlecone.jpg
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Just got back from a trip to Owens Valley. Shot this at Patriarch Grove at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains. This was my third attempt to get this shot, as the previous day I got skunked by heavy clouds and last month I had equipment failure. But finally the ancient tree spirits seem to have smiled on me.

This place really is amazing, too. Its incredibly moving to stand up there, in the cold wind at 11,000' on a lonely mountain peak, among the oldest trees on earth. Some of these trees are more than 4,800 years old!

Nikon Z9 + Rokinon 14mm f/2.8
ISO 6400, 8s, f/2.8
40 exposures, 37 lights, 3 darks
Light painting in foreground with LumeCube Go panel at 5600k
Stacked with StarryLandscapeStacker
Untracked, since my tracker went in for warranty repairs
 
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MorganP said:
Very nice shot. If your not doing stair trails why stack 40 shots?
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Thanks!

Basically the stacking is for noise reduction. Stacking the sky shots (lights) in a stacking program cleans it up a lot. Adding darks (same exposure settings, but lens cap on) further helps filter out electronic noise and hot/dead pixels. You can go further and do other types of calibration frames (flats, bias), but I usually just go basic with the darks/lights. I find it tends to produce better results for astrophotography than Topaz or other general de-noise programs. And the more frames you add, the cleaner the sky will become.

The only issue I've found is that occasionally the stacker program has a bit of trouble with particularly complicated foreground masking, which I discovered in this shot only after I got home and loaded it up on my big monitor rather than my laptop. I've got to go back in and touch up the spots the masking missed just a little, now that I've seen and can't unsee it. 😅
 
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I was told by a well known night photographer if you leave "High ISO NR" on and " Long exposure NR" the camera would take a second shot with the shutter closed giving you the black noise reduction you are talking about. The one big problem is it doubles the time of the shutter speed. This could be a problem with time-lapse.
 
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Bill Schone said:
Great capture & processing!
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Tadzio said:
Very nice capture!
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Thanks, y'all! :D

MorganP said:
I was told by a well known night photographer if you leave "High ISO NR" on and " Long exposure NR" the camera would take a second shot with the shutter closed giving you the black noise reduction you are talking about. The one big problem is it doubles the time of the shutter speed. This could be a problem with time-lapse.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was experimenting with those NR features on the Z9. I quickly discovered that it takes more time, which messed up the timing with my intervalometer, d'oh! I'm not sure I saw significant noise reduction benefits, though. I need to take it out some more and do a more solid, methodical comparison, I think.
 
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Yes it doubles the time. It take the picture and then takes a second photo the same length of time with the shutter closed creating black shot to reduce noise for that shot.
The problem shows' up in time laps if you are doing stair trails it may look like a sewing stitch with spaces in between the streaks.
 
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