Granite and Lemmon

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

2 days on from Lucky Bay, I was half way back to Perth when I stopped at Hyden to shoot the asteroid. I setup my cameras on the summit of Wave Rock and shot some timelapse of comet Lemmon in the first half of the night.

This is a 50 mm view including the Mag clouds and a granite boulder. Shot at iso 6400, 13 second shutter, f/2.5 on Canon 6D. Green airglow is strong in the lower part of the sky.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Great shot, Colin!

[gregbradley]

Great shot. Perhaps a quick flash of light on the boulder may have been better as the rock seems to be a bite out of the picture. Just an opinion.
Great framing of the comet and the Magellanic clouds.
Greg.

[RickS (Rick)]

I agree with Greg that a bit of detail in the boulder would be nice but a fantastic shot all the same, Colin!

[rogerg (Roger)]

Two things amaze me about this shot Colin:

1) it's only 13 seconds.

2) you have green sky glow in what I gather from your description is a inland location. As per our discussion at Astrofest, I still wonder about my inability to get anything other than yellow-orange. I must play with white balance a bit more perhaps.

Great shot too btw. I do worry the boulder is too dominant compared to the comet etc, but personal taste.

[colinmlegg (Colin)]

Thanks guys, appreciate your feedback and thoughts I'll see what I can do with the rock. I think I clipped it to black, so I'll try a repro and see how much light I can pull out of it. Now that you mention it, it does look like a cutout.

Roger, I think it was another genuine greenish night. I haven't done much different with the processing. The night before at Cape Arid half the air glow was red, so lots of variation around. I know what you mean by yellow, though. I had 2 nights at Lake Ballard with a sky like that. On the 3rd night the yellow mass cleared away and was replaced by green. Same thing happened at Paynes Find. Very interesting phenomenon.

[CapturingTheNight (Greg)]

Wonderful shot Colin As you know I really like silhouettes of objects in some of my night sky shots, but yeah, I tend to agree with the others on this that if you could pull a bit of detail out of the rock it would be a stronger image.