Astronomy pic of the day (9/29/08)

Coolness!
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

That's pretty cool - nice to see someone get so creative with the FG and keep it looking pretty natural. I think it could use some CW rotation though.

Duh, this is NOT a single "long" exposure as the title states. A long exposure would cause star trails, not pinpoint stars. Someone is lying, and it is a very poor one at that...

Wow that's pretty impressive!! I really want to try this!!
Tim, check this out http://www.naturephotographers.net/imagecritique/ic.cgi?a=vp&pr=82816&CGISESSID=172248e02d522bc32f19bd94c87ca573&u=14078 I'm sure this is what he did with the shot

That is a single photo in the post you linked to (easy to do with high iso), but the one posted at the top of this page was not a single photo - the photographer even noted it was a "long" exposure so he could paint the inside of the cave, and so the stars would have moved - it is a composted shot, which is fine, except that he is saying it is a single photo which is impossible, and it looks really bad to boot...

Hey Tim - If the exposure was maybe 30 seconds or a minute (a long exposure) you wouldn't really get trails, right? But would you be able to get such a detailed sky exposure? (I really don't know.) Does anyone know if this shot would have had to have been done by tracking?

As for the painting - it said it was flash, not light painting, so it wouldn't have taken much time.

(Please forgive me - I'm not trying to belittle the great photo, only point out it is not as stated.) David - yes, you actually get star movement in an exposure of even 15 seconds. You can get pinpoint stars with tracking but guess what - the camera is rotating so the foreground blurs. The note said it was lit with a "flashlight" not a flash. And if you look closely at the lighting inside the cave you will see that it was actually lit from two different directions - some of the rocks were lit from outside the cave since the shadows are on the camera side - this would mean a really long exposure (he said by the crescent moon), while the ceiling was lit with a flashlight - again a long exposure so the stars would blur. No exif data available to confirm the exposure length - and when you combine exposures like this there is no telling which one the exif is from anyway. Sorry, it is a composition and not a single exposure. No big deal, we see compositions all the time, but it is sad this was trying to make a big deal out of something that really wasn't - the photo is great and would stand on its own. Of course, we were all worried about him waiting alone in the dark for the right exposure because mountain lions were a concern, ha, ha! That bottom line is that what I say about it doesn't really mean anything - I'm taking my thoughts from my own experience and what is obvious in this particular photo. The photo is meant to be enjoyed by all so I think I'll bow out and let the rest enjoy and believe what was proposed...

The blend is sooo obvious. Look at where the sky meets the plateau....

If you're seeing blending artifacts, it's possible that the RAW was double processed to increase dynamic range.

Maybe someone should email him to ask for more details about how he managed to do this without a blend, before publicly accusing an award-winning photographer of lying about his image.

Agreed Curtis - point well taken. His website is down right now, but if I can I'm going to email him....I do feel a bit bad making too many guesses or assumptions without proof. I've seen these discussions online before where people were SO sure an image was a fake and turned out to be an actual single photo. Parallax, small web images, and post processing can create things that seem wrong, but aren't. Here's a good example of that.

wow... That is one mind bending photo David! Even when you see the whole frame, it's difficult to resolve the edge of Tiger's shirt. Thanks for posting the link!

Just a quick note to say I have emailed Wally and hopefully was courteous enough to have him respond.

Here is Wally's reply, posted here with his permission (paragraph breaks are mine) :

I am simply an amateur astronomer that loves the night sky and has a passion for recording the night sky as it really is from interesting settings like national parks and landmarks that folk are familar with. I have been doing this now for 44 years and in that time not only have I learnt a few things but I have seen tremendous advances in technology that enable folk to take photographs of the stars as pin points in seconds rather than minutes like in the old days.

My night sky/landscape photographs which are my trademark have traditionally always been single frame shots of both the night sky and landmarks in one single exposure. In the olden days like for comet hale-bopp, the longer time exposures with tracked camera to follow the stars would always leave a tell tail sign on the landscape rocks as they would blur if lit or they would cast a shadow against the background stars if you lit them momentarily like with a flash. Now a days, all is different. Anybody with a decent digital camera like canon 20D and 24mm lens with high iso like 1600 at f/1.6 can record deep detail in the Milky Way in just 20 seconds and 10 times more stars than the eye can see. So now it is an easy matter to capture stars frozen as points of light and the foreground in sharp focus with no movement even when focued on infiniti with the right lens. Folk that are saying there must be star trails or ground movement in a shot like the False Kiva shot are very accurate in their accessment for eguipment and technology that is several years old, but they are sadly lacking in what can be done today with some of the more basic DSLR cameras that are available at the local costco store.

How False Kiva was taken:
Been to False Kiva (1200 mile plus round trip) 4 previous times, all photographic failures, hiked the 2 mile trail with last part down a very steep canyon wall trail, hiked out in dark and got lost each and every time. It's dark out there.

Canon 5D, iso 1600 Raw, f/2.5, 25 second exposue with camera on a stationary tripod (no tracking). The cave is huge, so the 24 mm lens required me to take 4 separate (camera veritical) shots shooting one shot at 25 seconds and then moving the camera horizontally for the next shot and so on until I got the entire cave. Each shot was a sky/landscape shot and I had a professional lab sticth the photos together with a panoramic blending software to make it one continous horizontal shot as I am a photoshop moron.

The lighting was from 4 sources (which I learnt from my 4 previous failed attempts - after all one can drive 1200 miles to take a single shot only so many times). The stars/Milky Way of course provided their own light for the sky, the trip was planned for a small cresent moon to be setting in the west to light up the left and center canyon walls, and a large flashlight was positioned out side the cave on the left to bounce light off a flat rock to hit the right canyon wall with some faint light. Inside the cave, I used a series of flashlights and or strokes to bounce light off the far left/right walls to evenly light the cave (there was no direct lighting). There was absolutely no superimposing of any portion in this image or any other image I have ever done. To me that's important as my whole purpose is to show folk what the sky really is like from different landmarks in this great country of ours. As for the questioning about why no haze is seen next to the horizon in the sky yet is seem in the far canyon hills then my guess would be that those saying such are thinking of a day shot. This is a night shot - everything is dark. It rained that day heavily so there was no haze. It is the cresent moon that is lighitng up the close canyon walls and they are sharp, but the farther you go down you run into moonshadow that is not haze but simply darkness where the camera can not record detail so it looks like haze. The same for the far canyon walls look like they are covered with haze, but it is just because they are so far, the slight moonlight does not bounce back enought light from those far canyons for the camera to see any detail (you folk are calling that haze), yet the stars which have their own light of course show thru the haze which is not there (but only in folks minds) and hits the camera sensors full on.

I have been around long enough to know that no matter what explaination I give as to how real a photograph I took is, there are always the arm chair folk that would rather critizise others than do anything themselves. If you don't believe what I say (everything here is testable) and then believe the great body of work I have done over the years that is clearly recognized by experts in the field of astronomy/photography. This is my 29th APOD. Those folk are not dummies. I might be able to fool the APOD folk one time, but 29 times???? How about TIME-LIFE photo editors. They picked my Hale-Bopp pic as Pic of year in 1997 - out of millions submitted. They also picked my Mars Closest encounter in 50,000 years as Pic of year in 2003 for both LIFE magazine and a different image for TIME magazine, again out of millions submitted. My night sky work sells in over 30 national parks, where each park goes thru an intrepretive review process to determine that the photos are genuine - none have been turned down. NASA still has my Hale-Bopp shot on their front Hale-Bopp web page, etc....

For those of you who can, just enjoy the photograph and for others that can't do that then simply take one that we all can enjoy.

We live in a great country with so much to see and photograph. There is much that is untouched waiting for us to capture.

May you enjoy the process.
All the best.
Wally
An amateur astronomer - my greatest honor

And a little follow up on the stitching, and how APOD says it a "single exposure" :

Hi this is wally again, the photographer that started this mess. When I submitted the photograph to APOD I did not mention anything about exposure. When they run a photo they do not check with the photogrpher if everything in their comments are correct or not. Generally these guys are dead on accurate. These guys know me (as they have published me 28x prior) and in every case prior I have always submitted single image one frame sky/landscape shots so in this case they assumed this is Wally so it has to be single exposure. Keep in mind, I submitted a horizontal pano photograph so I could show the whole cave, but that pano is made up of 4 side by side sky/landscape shots where each frame is a shot of the sky and landmark(cave) all in one single exposure. This is no composite of the sky being put it. It is a horizontal pano stich of the sky and cave at once. Hope I didn't add more confusion. With modern cameras with high iso
and short exposures the sky and landmarks can be shot in one single exposure. Here I simply added 4 such shots together to give the viewer the complete view.
Wally