Galactic Lake
By Chris Maust
One of the highlights of moving to SD for me was its close proximity to so many dark sky sites, yet being able to live in a major city with things to do, but I didn’t realize just how many/how close they would be.
The other night Stephen Bay, Luyi Zhao and I headed up to Cuyamaca Rancho State Park for some astro on the lake. We had discussed going out to the desert, but the forecast for high winds was a bit of a deterrent. We got up to the lake and had the place to ourselves, with the exception of a family camping (literally millimeters out of frame on the left in this shot). It was a bit windy at the lake as well, but it was an amazing night and the skies were clear for the most part.
I’ve honestly really been liking the subtle light pollution on the horizons around here, especially with some low hanging clouds, can create such a nice color palette of bright warm tones mixed with the cooler tones of the evening.
The past few times I’ve been out shooting, I’ve tried to slow down a bit and try out different techniques, see what does/doesn’t work. I shot the sky at such a high ISO with the hopes of making my stars pinpoint, but I’m not 100% sure it made that much difference in the end. I will say that, if conditions allow it, I will probably always shoot my foregrounds at 1600 or lower from now on, the difference even in a single 1600iso shot vs a 15 stack 6400 foreground are insane.
Great night out with some awesome people, looking forward to doing it again real soon.
Canon 6D / Irix 15mm
SKY = 15 frames @ f2.8 / 12sec / ISO 12,800 / stacked in Sequator
Foreground = 1 frame @ f2.8 / 120sec / ISO 1600
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