Stars over the Sierra Panoramic

I have taken several star images in my life but I never have created a panorama of star images before. The light for this sunrise over the Sierra mountains was perfect for such an attempt! The exposures were fairly short, 10 seconds at f/4 at 2500 ISO so getting consistent exposures was easy. The worst part was it was 26 degrees outside and I was cold! In fact too cold to think straight and I did not do a good job of leveling my Canon 1D Mark 4 camera with the 17mm TS lens. This caused a real problem when I tried to stitch these images together in Photomerge within Photoshop. The program just couldn’t do it! The perspective was way off and everything was distorted. But I really wanted this pano so I had to resort to the old fashioned way and put it all together manually with layers, layer masks and adjustment layers to get the parts to blend because for some reason Auto-Blend would not work when I created the layers. It was a bit labor intensive, but I am glad I took the time! Notice the constellation Orion just left of center! I was so amazed how much detail the camera was able to pick up on the mountains, because my eyes could not see that at the time. It was worth every finger-numbing minute!

Enjoy,