Do you ever go back and re-edit old photos?  Every once in a while I do this; most often with my night sky images when I’ve learned some new technique.  Well over this past winter we had very very few clear nights that coincided with the correct moon phase… which essentially means I didn’t get to do a lot of astrophotography over the winter.  Not nearly as much as I’d liked to have – and so it goes with living where I do.  Not wanting to get rusty on my editing techniques, I started playing around with older data and challenging myself to do different things.  With the help of some new friends, I ended up learning a TON.  As I wrap up this series on night sky images, I wanted to take a minute to share some of the results of all the playing I did.

This week’s Picture of the Week is what I call my “dusty” edit of the Milky Way.  Space is actually full of dust particles, some areas more tightly populated than others.  What I realized this winter was that a lot of the things I had been editing out of my images, thinking it was just some data artifact, was actually space dust, and was SUPPOSED to be there!  I made it my goal to try to emphasize this dust, and edited in such a way so that it shows up, rather than ditching it.  The result is a rather dusty looking sky, with all sorts of stuff going on in the entire image.  Pretty fun!  I’m looking forward to shooting more in dark skies later this year to see what else I can capture.

Down in the Alternative Perspectives section are a couple more images I wanted to share that I’d re-edited.  For the first image, I’ve mentioned this many times, but these days I shoot my foreground and sky separately.  This is so I can have the highest quality / most detailed final result.  However, this can lead to problems.  I use an app so I can see how the sky is supposed to align for a given scene.  That app is prone to errors caused by interference in the phone’s GPS – or any number of things – and so when I set all this up I thought the sky would be oriented differently than it actually is.  Before I published the image, I noticed the error, and so I never published the image because accuracy of the sky is a big deal to me personally.  Well, I always liked the foreground, so a couple weeks ago and re-shot the sky.  Now, obviously this was done years apart, so that image is a composite image for sure, BUT it was a fun little project to see what I could accomplish.  Some clouds rolled in as I shooting the sky, so unfortunately there is a lot more light pollution and “junk” in the sky than I’d prefer.  In any case, it gives me something to re-shoot in the Spring, and hopefully find a composition that allows me to get closer to that famous dogwood tree, and highlight it more.

The second image is simply me re-editing existing data of the Rho Ophiuchus complex.  This part of the night sky is SUPER dusty, as you can see, and I really enjoyed seeing how far I could push that idea. 

Next week we’re hitting the road again!  I have a slew of images to share from my trip to Japan, so I hope you’ll join me then!

–Dan Thompson