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Favourites of 2024 (Part 1)


Creating an astrophotograph requires planning, photographing the night sky and careful processing. Combining all of these leads to an image that you may have envisioned even before you started doing any of these. One requires some patience and technical and artistic skill to achieve the desired results. In this article, I discuss stories and techniques behind creating some of my favourite images from 2024.

Starlights and citylights

This image was captured from Sadhutar (2500 meters), a small and beautiful valley in eastern Nepal. I travelled to this region in March 2024 and spent 3 nights capturing the night sky. This region, however, has Bortle 2 skies. Some local light pollution stopped it from being the best of the skies in this region. The sky in the northern direction, however, was better. On the last night of the trip, around 2 am at night, I was capturing some deep sky images when one of the tour members grabbed my attention. She was looking for some composition around the valley and came across this tree. Looking towards the north, this tree seemed perfect for a circumpolar star trail. Although the weather was hazy, the city lights were looking like a thousand stars down the valley. I did not want to miss the opportunity.

I was carrying a Nikon Z8 and the Nikon Z 20mm and was testing it for the first time. I quickly set up, taking some time to finalise the composition. This was also the time when I was testing the usage of longer shutter speeds for star trails, deviating from the conventional 30 seconds. I checked with a couple of test shots for the composition and histogram and finalised with 60-second long exposures. Setting the number of shots to 200 (worth more than 3 hours of data), I returned to my other set-up for some deep-sky images. After an hour, I realised that the northern sky was filled with passing clouds, enough to ruin the star trail photos. I reached this set-up, stopped the sequence and found that I could only gather 30 good images before the clouds rolled in.

A single image from the sequence, unprocessed
A single image from the sequence, unprocessed

Initially, I was not entirely sure if I would create an image with this small amount of data. Loading all the images to Photoshop as layers and adding them with the “lighten” blend mode, I realised that the image was not as bad as I initially thought. For a star trail image like this, I “double processed” the image, one processing for the sky portion with increased saturation and smoothening and another process for the foreground, making it sharp. These two versions were blended using a mask in Photoshop.

Equipment Details: Nikon Z8, Nikon Z 20mm f/1.8, Benro Rhino series tripod

Exif details: 30 * 60 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 1600, 20mm

Satrlight and citylight, the final image
Satrlight and citylight, the final image

Lali gurans

In April 2024, I and my colleague Basudeb Chakrabarti set out to a lesser-known region of Nepal named Tinjure (2850 meters). This place is also known as the “Rhododendron capital of Nepal”, as the valley is full of red flowers. April and May are the months when this valley turns red as the flowers bloom during this season. The skies were marked as Bortle 1 on the light pollution map. However, we found that the local light pollution from the few homes made it a little worse. We decided to spend two nights in this location before heading out to another location. The first night, however, was wasted due to continuous rain and storms. On the second day, we saw a glimpse of hope as the morning sky showed the clear patches. But that soon turned out to be a false hope as it started raining, accompanied by hailstorms in the evening and early night. With a heavy heart, we went to sleep.

Around 2 am, I heard my colleague shouting and talking to someone. I was too lazy to leave the comfortable bed to check what was happening. Soon, he came to my room and told me that the sky had cleared up. I almost ran to the field with my slippers on (and did I forget to mention that it was almost freezing cold outside?) and saw the Milky Way rising over a distant mountain. Well, it took us 15 minutes to get dressed up, carry our gears to the field, polar align our trackers and start shooting. By 2.30 am, our cameras were up and running, capturing the beautiful Sagittarius arm.

Single image of the foreground, unprocessed
Single image of the foreground, unprocessed

For the first image of this trip, we wanted to try out the new Nikon Z 50mm f/1.2, which one of our friends kindly lent us for a few days. With the test shots, we were literally blown away by the sharpness and details that the lens produced. We wanted to shoot a vertical panorama of the Milky Way rising over the Red Valley. The sky portion is composed of 2 panels of vertorama and one panel was used for the foreground.

Single image of the top sky panel, unprocessed
Single image of the top sky panel, unprocessed

The sky panels were stacked in Sequator. The processing and stitching were done in Pixinsight to extract more details from the images. The foreground portion was processed using Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop, and both sections were combined using Photoshop.

2 panels for the sky stacked and stitched
2 panels for the sky stacked and stitched

Equipment details: Nikon Z6ii, Nikon Z 50mm f/1.2, iOptron Skyguider Pro, Leofoto LS324c + LH 40

Exif details: 2 panels of 10 * 60 seconds, f/2, ISO 800, 50 mm (for sky); 1 panel of 5 * 90 seconds, f/2, ISO 1250, 50mm (for foreground)

Lali gurans (Red flowers), the final image
Lali gurans (Red flowers), the final image

600 Years of trailing

Kyrgyzstan offered me some of the best skies and landscapes I could have imagined. Reaching a place called Tash Rabat on the 3rd day of my Kyrgyzstan trip in June 2024, I realised that the place had endless possibilities for nightscape photography. I was scheduled to spend two nights at this location. The first night, however, presented us with snow, and I was not able to take a single image. The next morning and afternoon were full of clouds, too. The sky started clearing at sunset as if someone had done some magic. The night was full of stars, and I saw the best night sky scenes with my naked eyes.

This location had a 15th-century caravanserai, “Tash Rabat”. This 600-year-old stone structure, situated at the Old Silk Route, served as a resting place for travellers and traders traversing through this route, especially after crossing the Torugart pass. This region was situated at an altitude of 3200 meters. My teammates and I stayed at the traditional yurts used by nomads in this region (and it was an experience that is hard to forget).

Single exposure for the sky, unprocessed
Single exposure for the sky, unprocessed

Towards the middle of the second night, around 1 am, I decided to photograph the caravanserai with the background stars. I had to decide whether to use a wider lens to capture the Polaris region with a circumpolar star trail or with a 50 mm lens focusing more on the caravanserai. In the end, I went with a 24mm lens (that I was testing for the first time), choosing a middle ground. I had set up my equipment and started a sequence of 160 images (a random number, of course) of 60 seconds long for the star trails. At the end of this sequence, as I was looking through them, the foreground looked a little darker than what I expected. To complete the image, I took a few more images exposing the foreground portion without moving my tripod.

Single exposure for the foreground, unprocessed
Single exposure for the foreground, unprocessed

The complete processing was done in two parts in Photoshop. The first part was to load the sky images as layers and combine them for star trails. In this part, the processing was done to bring out the colours of the stars. In the second part, 5 images for the foreground were loaded as layers and stacked with “Median” mode to reduce noise. The processing was done with minimal processing and selective dodging (to highlight the caravanserai). Finally, the two sections were blended using masks in Photoshop.

Equipment details: Nikon Zf, Nikon Z 24mm f/1.8, Leofoto LS 323c + LH 40

Exif details: 160 * 60 seconds, f/1.8, ISO 2500, 24 mm (for sky). 5 * 90 seconds, f/1.8, ISO 2500, 24mm (for foreground)

600 years of trailing, the final image
600 years of trailing, the final image

Clear skies!





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