We have a cottage in Northern Quebec, on Lake Kippawa, quite far from any sources of artificial illumination (the closest town is Témiscamingue). Here’s a google map:
I’ve seen the Milky Way many times, and it is spectacular indeed. What it is not, as others have said, is coloured (to the naked eye). It is also not as bright as the above photos make it appear.
The reason I say “spectacular” is that, when viewing conditions are correct, the Milky Way really appears to have depth to it; it really looks like you are looking at something infinitely large and far away. It is hard to describe but it is much more impressive than a photo, however enhanced, can depict.
Maybe I’ve never seen the night sky under optimal conditions. But I will put a challenge to those who describe it as similar to the massively photoshopped canoe image (I’m talking to you, billfish678 :)). I know enough about photography to know that long exposures look like this 20-minute exposure or this 3.5 hour exposure.
Can you provide or cite a photo of the night sky that looks anything remotely like the canoe pic which isn’t edited or taken through a telescope, and which provides technical data and discloses any photo editing?
Those examples of yours are retarded examples. You might as well show me an electron microscope photo and bitch that you cant see that with the naked eye.
Multi hour photos that show star trails many degrees long. Nope, you cant see that with the naked eye. Surpise, Surpise :rolleyes:
Multi minute/hour photos with the moon out so the landscape looks like daylight. Nope, you can’t see that with the naked eye. Surprise, Surprise :rolleyes:
Photos where someone ran around with a bright light or flash and lit up the trees or tents or whatever. Good grief.
I’ll repeat. Multiple people here besides (and including myself) have noted that the Milkway can be and IS spectacular.
Virtually EVERY amateur astronomer I personally know who actually DOES any significant visual astronomy would agree to most if not all of the following things. Under the right conditions, the milkway is spectacular. It is bright and obvious. There are plenty of details to be seen. Photos really can’t capture its beauty. When its really good you can even detect faint shadow cast by it. It lights up the surrounding landscape enough that you can actually see it at some ghostly level. It goes way way past just lots of stars and appears milky (which photos almost never show) when its really good.
The “problems” with the “canoe” photo.
The meteor. They arent there every time you look up (really? I did not know that). The flip side is that the meteor isnt nearly as bright as good one would look visually, so in some respects that aspect of the photo is LESS impressive than real life. Can I see a great night sky and see a nice meteor on occasion? Shit yeah.
The canoe itself. I dont give a rats ass if it took a half hour exposure to show that thing or it was photoshopped in. I don’t care if the fracker was computer generated for that matter. In real life, in dark sites, I’ve seen exactly that aspect of the photo as well. A ghostly but detectable image of something on the water with a spectacular night sky above.
The dark sillouete of the trees/horizon. Seen EXACTLY that many a time. No problems there. But have often seen the landscape lit up too. Next.
The reflection. Yeah, that part has two problems. Any long term exposure would likely have ripples. But it doesnt HAVE to have them. I’ve used low power optics to look at reflections off the water of astronomical objects and under the right conditions a pond or lake can be amazingly flat and calm. But the eye DOESNT do long term exposures, its REAL time, so the lack of ripples isnt any real reflection on your typical visual reality of the situation, but moreso that some trickery was probably involved to allow they image to show what would be normal for the eyes to actually see in real life (and whats wrong with that?). Finally, the reflection is brighter than it should be. Then again, I seen some pretty nice nighttime reflections so its more of an exaggeration of real life than an outright deception IMO.
And finally, the Milkway itself in the sky proper. It has way more color than you can see. But then again, its not like the photo is bursting with color in the first place. The constrast and crispness/sharpness are a bit more than you can see with the naked eye.
But again, that photo doesnt capture other visually impressive aspects of the milkyway that CAN be seen by the naked eye and typically are not captured by photo.
So, IMO (very experienced BTW) some aspects are turned up a notch, whilst others are not even present. IMO those two factors balance out to some extent.
If you wanna bitch that you arent going to take a point and shot camera and get a shot just like that in one frame, handheld, on the first try, in just about any half assed location on the planet, have at it. You’d be right. And I dont care, because IMO its besides the point.
If you wanna claim this some massive visual misrepresentation of what you can actually see under the right conditions, then IMO you are either being contrarian, don’t know your eyepiece from a hole in the ground, have never been to dark site (and/or know how to use it), or are getting Clitonesque in your word defintions.
I have not been anyplace where you can see as dramatic a display as what you describe. I’m not saying it’s not true, I’m saying I want to see it.
I am asking for a photo to accurately show what the night sky looks like under truly favorable conditions, including f-stop, exposure, focal length, type of camera, and without digital manipulation. I didn’t see that for any of the photos linked upthread.
CookingWithGas, I’m not quite as passionate as certain other posters in this thread, but I don’t understand what the photos you posted hope to achieve? Most terrestrial photos of the night sky use some kind of apparatus that causes the camera physically to track the stars as they move across the sky, giving pinpoints rather than streaks, in the final photo. Better pointers are the time-lapse videos, which use shorter exposures, such as this one (again, disregard the color depth).
Though he concedes the Milky Way is “relatively faint”, he also reports that “some newbies even pack up to go home around 2:00 because they think the rising Milky Way is an approaching thunderstorm!”
Not responding for Cooking, but from my perspective the difficulty with the time-lapse photographs and videos (with the motor to keep the camera circling with the sky) is that they will tend to capture more light than you could see with the naked eye.
Lovely photos and movies, but slightly misleading as a guide to what you could expect to see on your own.
Not that what you would see isn’t quite grand - it is, if light pollution is low or absent. It just isn’t as bright and colourful. Though as I said, no mere photo or movie can do justice to the sheer depth and scale of actually seeing it “live”.
Photos and film and electronic cameras and computer monitors dont act like eyes. If I had a slow ass film it might take 4 hours to get a photo that looks like what the eye sees (things used to be that bad and even worse photography wise). Would you say it wasnt realistic because it took 4 hours to take that photo? A superduper electronic video camera might show way more than the eye could see in real time. Would you then say that it WAS realistic because it was taken in real time ? Those details don’t matter, unless you want to argue how real a photo is in some strange photography sense, not a visual sense.
Its been explained here several times. Take the canoe photo. Ditch the canoe. Ditch the reflection in the water. Ditch the meteor. Since those things seem to be getting some people bent outa shape and arent really pertinent anyway.
Eliminate most color, except perhaps the color of the brightest stars. Make it not quite as sharp/high resolution. Maybe not quite as much contrast. And there you go, thats the Milkway IMO. But remember there are other aspects of the milkyway the camera is NOT capturing. Myself and others have covered that.
The photo is still spectacular IMO. So is the Milkyway visually under the right conditions. But one is not and probably cannot ever be exactly like the other.
Which is more " real " ? A dramatic still shot of a football player catching a football in mid leap or a dramatic slow motion shot of the same thing or a short video clip shown in real time/speed or the real thing seen visually up close and live ? Yeah, you can process the non-visual ones SOO much they aren’t even “reality”, but then again at some point you have to say “yeah, thats about as close as you are going to get given they arent really the same thing”.
Another example. You can find spectacular images of Saturn all over. Everybody has seen em. Details and color out the ying yang. When you look at it through a telescope, by comparision, it looks like crap. Some faint color, some minor details, thats it. You have to have really good eyes, lots of experience , a good scope, and good seeing before you can begin to see more than the most basic details. You’ll never match the good photos either. Most beginners can see only see a small pale yellow ball (and they probably dont even detect that color), a shadow or two, and the small ring with virtually no detail of its own surrounding it. There is almost no contest between what they see visually and the pics they have seen.
But, you know what ? Most every person who has never seen Saturn through a telescope before lets out an audible gasp or a “wow” or a “neat” or a “cool” or a “for shizzle” or something when they see it “live” with their own eyes for the first time. At some point, a pics vs visual consideration discussion just ceases to have any real meaning.
Another poster up thread had a nice series of various links that he thought (and I agree) were decent representations of what you could see visually.
If you REALLY would like to see the Milkway the best you can, maybe I can give some usefull advice later this evening.
Sorry about getting my hackles up, but from my point of view and experience, some posts here sound like the equivalent of calling the Grand Canyon just some random hole in the ground.
Sold. I have never been anywhere where you can see the sky quite like that. Or maybe it’s just my timing. I am also at a loss to understand why the Milky Way has that “black cloud” streak permeating it.
Granted. But one thing that many photographers do is try to present a scene that depicts how they experienced it. However, in some cases they create a “photo” that never really existed in the first place.
I have been to the Great Pyramids at Giza three or four times and have also photographed them. Looking at a photograph, even a really great one by a professional photographer, cannot possibly convey the experience of being there. I understand what you’re saying about the Milky Way. However, the photos do depict in an objective way what the eye sees, and that’s the representation I want to see of the Milky Way as seen from a remote location with a great view. I understand that I won’t get the same experience, but I don’t want to see a Thomas Kinkade poster, either.
My reaction to that particular photo (and I don’t want this discussion to get snagged on that one photo) is that if there are all these obvious signs of manipulation then I’m going to think that maybe this was a shot taken by means that has no relation to something that could be seen by the naked eye from Earth.
I’ve stated 3 or 4 times is really does have some relationship to what you see. And how its better and worse and different from the “real” thing. So have other posters.
Here ya go, but in many ways the following photos dont do it justice. These are copyrighted images with all rights reserved.
First one, scroll down a fair bit. Note that these are not particularly wide angle, he just has a few shoots of the brightest section of the milkyway.
Well I want to thank the dope for bringing the night sky to my attention, I’ve been having a hard time of it lately and this kind of beauty is almost religiously uplifting. I’ve never been more frustrated about my myopic eyes!
They’re called “dust lanes”. Basically, it’s darker dust or gas in between you and the stars behind it; they’re areas where the interstellar medium is denser than normal. Here’s pic of another galaxy that has a pronounced dust lane.
If you get to a dark-sky site, the dust lanes in the Milky Way are quite easy to make out with your naked eye.
I was in the Big Bend, TX area at a ranch nestled in the rolling hills where you could see MacDonald Observatory as another bump on top of one of the hills. The afternoon was great because you could literally see the clouds rolling over the hills.
That night I was out and saw thousands of stars. Lying down I made sure no treetops were in my range of vision. I could see the Milky Way as an actual band of milky white. I didn’t see all of it because I don’t remember the large gaseous areas the photos show, just a thicker band of stars with a truly milky white background.
After a few minutes lying there it seemed as though I could feel the Earth turn. The depth of field struck me as dizzying and it seemed I could keeping trying to focus on further and further stars and galaxies forever. Still looking up I let another strange sensation overtake me. I felt myself not lying but pinned vertically with the Earth against my back and the stars out in front of me. It lasted just a few seconds but was breathtaking.
I am in the Navy, and have seen the Milky Way from the middle of the Ocean. After Flight ops were done, I would go up on to the wing of a Hornet, lay out and just stare at the sky. Being from near NYC, I never imagined that there were so many stars, and that they were so bright. Yes, the Milky Way looked awesome, but it was definately not as sharp to my eyes as the canoe photo, and I had 20/15 vision at the time. Also, more recently, I have had the opporunity to look at the sky through Night Vision Devices, and could see even more stars, although the brighter ones caused the device to bloom and wash out nearby stars, and they made everything green…
I would have to say that seeing the night sky from the Middle of the ocean is a perk of the Navy, and am excited because I may do a North Sea/Baltic Sea cruise next year, and the idea of seeing the Aurora Borealis while at sea has me anticipating it already…
So part of what you are “seeing” is your emotional reaction to the scene? Don’t have a problem with that; I’ve experienced it myself…
just like that, more than once.
But then, it seemed to me that you were berating beowulff with:
for the crime of not having the same emotional reaction you did. I suspect you’ll have an emotional reaction to my assesment, too. And I suspect it will be more hot air about how your emotional reaction is the correct one. (And make no mistake, the analogy of seeing pictures of Saturn vs. viewing Saturn IS an emotional reaction. Like you said, the colour and detail in the pictures is unmatched.)
