Milky Way over Boulder Beach

Category: Parks

Tags: Acadia National Park, Boulder Beach, Milky Way, Mount Desert Island, night, night photography, night sky, panorama, workshop

May 16, 2015, 12:29 – 01:16 AM This is a spherical panorama that I shot of the Milky Way over Boulder Beach in Acadia National Park during a night sky workshop that I taught last year. I set my tripod in a natural bowl in the boulders on the beach and shot two spheres: one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the ground and refocused on the boulders. I blended the images together in Photoshop first via masks, then stitched them with PTGui Pro. I left the tripod in the nadir to show what a properly calibrated nodal slide should look like after stitching; it should be a smooth circle with no sawtooths. In fact, I hardly needed any control points at all in PTGui as it was already nearly perfectly aligned before stitching. I waited until the Big Dipper was outlined by the trees in the opposite direction of the Milky Way’s arch before shooting the panorama. Camera settings: 14mm, f/2.8, ISO 6400, 20 seconds, 3786°K for the sky and 14mm, f/2.8, ISO 3200, 120 seconds, 4024°K for the ground. Stitching data: 2 rows of 6 columns x 2 exposures for a total of 24 photos. Finished panorama is 18192 x 9096 or ~165 megapixels. Equipment used: Nikon D810, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8, Promote Control, and Really Right Stuff TVC-34L tripod w/ leveling base & multi-row panning head. Long exposure noise reduction via Pixel Fixer.