Photo of the Week for October 28, 2016

Rising earlier and earlier as autumn progresses, Orion the hunter is one of the sky’s most recognizable constellations. But as anyone who has attempted constellation photography knows, one of the side effects of using digital cameras is that bright stars and faint stars tend to look the same, making familiar constellation patterns difficult to perceive. One way around this is to use a diffuser filter to help spread out the starlight—the brighter the star, the bigger the diffusion halo.

This Orion portrait was captured by Frédéric Caron of Sainte-Christine, Quebec. He used a Cokin 084 diffuser filter with a tripod-mounted (non tracking) Sony a7S mirrorless digital camera modified for “full spectrum” response and equipped with an internal IDAS HEUIB-II filter and a Sony 28-70 zoom lens set to 43mm and f/4.5. The final shot is a stack of 184, 5-second exposures shot at ISO32000.