4/24/2024 More Eclipse Fun
4/22/2024 The Moon!
You’ve heard of super full moons? This is a micro almost full moon. Two weeks ago, as it eclipsed the Sun, the Moon was close to Earth. Now, it is about 10% farther away and is measurably smaller in appearance. Two weeks ago, it would not have fit in my camera’s field of view. Last night, it did. I used a 127mm Maksutov telescope at prime focus and my Canon T8i to shoot about 40 frames, which were then combined and processed in Photoshop and Topaz Photo AI.
4/21/2024 Petit Jean State Park
Cedar Creek Falls Sunday morning.
I usually use Adobe Lightroom for general photography and Adobe Photoshop for astrophotography. For landscapes, I often shoot exposure bracketed so that I can combine the three images into one more balanced image. With this image, the Lightroom HDR merge option resulted in a picture with blown out highlights and crushed blacks. So, I decided to try something I have been thinking about since I was processing total eclipse photos recently. That is to use Photoshop’s, “load stack” option to align three images and put them into a smart object and then use a stack mode of “mean”. Above is the result, no crushed blacks or blown out highlights.
