Astrophotography - Windmill Nightscape

Equipment Used: Nikon D90 with 12-24mm f4 lense, Slik Pro 500DX tripod & Viltrox Remote.

A new moon and clear skies were forecasted for a few weeks ago so after getting permission to get on this property with a windmill, I ventured out to the location at 11:00 PM. A security light lit up the windmill so I didn’t need any speedlights on this nightscape shoot.

The above equipment was used in manual exposure mode with a shutter speed set to bulb, aperture at f4 and ISO at 1250 or 1600. I used the D90’s live view to help accurately focus the lense on the windmill. The Viltrox remote was set to do anywhere from 6 to 45 second length exposures. The 45 second exposures were used to create the star trail images by shooting each image 5 seconds apart for a total of 45 images.

In Capture NX-D, I adjusted the white balance to fluorescent and picture control to sport. The exposure compensation was increased 1/3 of a stop. To help reduce noise, I clicked the astro noise reduction feature. Shadow/Highlight sliders were also tweaked if need be.

StarStaX was used to create the star trail images by stacking 45 and 22 shot collections of the images together. Because I only separated each image by 5 seconds, I was able to use the gap filling function in StarStaX to make sure the star trails didn’t have any holes in them.

I opened the Tiff files in PSE 11 to do the final adjustments on these nightscapes. I had properly exposed images for the windmill and the sky so I had to blend them together using layer masks and the brush tool. The clone tool got rid of unwanted objects in the foreground of the image. Once all the adjustments were done, I sharpened the final image with a high pass filter.

With a new moon forecasted next to be in mid October, hopefully I’ll be able to capture harvest equipment below the beautiful bright sky filled with billions of stars. 

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