On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 11:46 PM, Patrick Wiggins wrote:
These days it's: Is it real or is it Photoshop?"
If you're talking about astrophotography, nothing is entirely real. Cameras capture more detail, depth of field, exposure, etc. than the eye ever can. In this case, blending two exposures is required - unless you want a blown out, featureless moon or Jupiter's moons missing. If you've ever seen an amazing photo of the Andromeda galaxy or the Orion nebula (or pretty much any other deep space object), they almost always involve blending - you can't expose for the core without losing fine detail, and vice versa. I once read that astrophotography is about maintaining the integrity of the stellar object, while throwing in a hefty dose of artistic creativity. To answer Joe's question, this image was a combination of two photos taken with different shutter speeds (one at 1/200 second and one at 1 second) taken just moments apart. I used a steady tripod, remote shutter trigger, mirror lockup, manual focus, and a vibration reduction lens. I usually would fuss with other settings to get more detail out of Jupiter, but it was too cold to bother. I brought both photos into Photoshop and precisely aligned them by toggling the layers, I then cropped the Jupiter image down to just the relevant portions (cropped out the extremely blown out moon), adjusted brightness/shadows a bit so the background black matched, and then sharpened the moon layer just a bit. Jared