Photo of the Week for June 8, 2018
Although many of us enjoy using a telescope to view challenging targets, such as faint galaxies and nebulas, or to glimpse elusive detail on Jupiter or Mars, there’s nothing quite like stepping back to take in the big-picture perspective.
Naked-eye astronomy has many rewards. The enjoyment derived from leisurely identifying constellations and asterisms is hard to beat—and the only gear you need to enhance the experience is a comfortable reclining chair. This photo of the Big Dipper over the Skitchine Lodge in North Kamloops, British Columbia, evokes the simple pleasure of looking up at a starry night.
Tom Evans of Calgary, Alberta, captured this view last July, and spent nearly a year learning the ins and outs of image processing before arriving at the result shown here. He used a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 6D DSLR camera at ISO 3200, with a Canon 16-35mm zoom lens (set to 16mm). The photo combines a total of 41 exposures to capture the full dynamic range of the scene. The star “points” were added in post-processing using the StarSpikes Pro 4, a PhotoShop plug-in filter.
