The photo +Vic Gundotra posted last night from his walk on the beach with his 13 year old son under the Milky Way (https://plus.google.com/+VicGundotra/posts/1cdRhapPYao) reminded me of the night my son +Thomas Sullivan (also 13 at the time) photographed this image below on a trip we took last summer.
Thomas took this photo using the old Canon 5D Mark II I purchased in 2009, and he entered this in the *Astronomy Photographer of the Year* photo contest held by the Royal Observatory Greenwich in London. The photo won a "Highly Commended" prize, and Thomas had it published with the other winners' photos from the past 4 years of the competition. His was one of the few photos in the book given a two-page spread, and a second photo of his was included as well. Both earned publishing licensing royalties in addition to the contest prize
To see the image without the fold of the book, here's a copy of the photo Thomas posted here on G+ last year: https://plus.google.com/110644297149520125895/posts/ZX6Pt7WghpA
Ironically Thomas was also on a beach this week. He used his earnings from the contest to join a friend heading with his family to Hawaii.
I still went out on some of my Summer Milky Way hunts. I can't afford to live near my son, but I'm sure that we'll find other opportunities to get out and spend some time together this year, possibly during the 9 days that I'll see him around his holiday break in December. We like to go explore Yosemite and Death Valley National Park, and some day I'd like to take him on a ski trip.
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Lovely
very nice!
Thanks +Irina Catighera and +Anna Rimovska!
Like father like son 🙂 Awesome! 🙂
Love it
Sort of +Swee Oh, but last year Thomas did better in the competition than I did!
Sadly this year I missed the entry deadline. I knew the date and corrected for the time change as i planned for my submission, but I had missed the detail buried in the rules that the contest ended at NOON in the local GMT time zone, not midnight as with most photo contests. Then I remembered that the same thing happened to me in 2010 as well. That's why I don't enter many photo competitions: each one has a different set of hoops to jump though, then even if you get images in you don't know what biases the judges might have.
I saw a judge mention after the submission deadline of one astrophotography competition that images should have a white balance setting making the Milky Way yellow. I spend a lot of time photographing the Milky Way, and I don't recall it looking particularly yellow to me (although I may now process more photos that way to meet that particular expectation and bias of astronomers). The most likely theory I can come up with for the "yellow Milky Way" preference is that most astronomers in recent decades have been working with increasing levels of brown air pollution as well as increasing light pollution from incandescent and sodium lights, both of which have a yellow tint. Also in the past astrophotography was done on film. It they used a daylight film with a white balance of 5500, there would be a definite yellow caste to the results.
The settings which seem to make my photos most accurately represent what I saw at night tend to be using a white balance setting in the 3800 to 4600 range, much more cool or "blue" than what photographers often use for daylight.
That may in part have something to do with shooting at high altitude, since my most natural-looking daylight results often require a cooler white balance setting then standard "daylight" 5500 as well.
I also can't help but observe that under moonlight, which apparently provides light with the same color temperature as the sun, I can often detect the same "blue sky" scattering of the light that we see under a blue sky during the day, even with the moon as low as 25% full. People not used to spending long periods of time under the stars assume that the night sky is black, but that's probably because they rarely spend at least 30 minutes outside without lights to let they eyes fully adjust, at least 1.5 hours away from sunset or sunrise (after 10 pm in the Summer). So our least biased viewing only comes after 10:30pm (after you've had lights completely off since 10 pm), and you really only get an unbiased view of the sky 100+ miles from the nearest major city, and 15+ miles from any town at all.
So for someone in Europe to tell me what the Milky Way looks like, and should look like in a digital image… that seems analogous to me trying to lecture someone in Hawaii what a beach looks like.
very very nice
happy father's day across the universe! ..and the gene painted much better..
Good morning, I like
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Nice