More stacking

A little more internet searching led me to a suggestion to use GIMP’s Lighten only mode for combining layers.

This is the same image from yesterday, only using Lighten only to combine the layers.

A photo of star trails composed by stacking shorter duration photos

I also found this great set of GIMP plugins that someone wrote for processing astronomy type images. It’s the ‘Set mode for all layers’ script that I was most interested in.

My third attempt at stacked images for star trails (the second attempt was all out of focus). This time I put the camera on burst mode, 30s exposure (the longest exposure my XT will do before bulb mode), f/3.5 and left the remote trigger locked down. This is Orion streaking through the sky, composed of 58 images.

Stacked star trails

The much shorter exposure and wide open aperture gives a much darker sky and brings out a lot more stars. It also means a lot more images to process: 60 images for a 30 minute exposure. Loading all those images requires a computer with lots of RAM.

Good thing I bumped the memory in my computer up to 24GB. The computer hardly breaks a sweat when I ask GIMP to load that many images (at 3456×2304, GIMP says each image takes up 71MB).

Now I want a wider angle lens for my camera.

Stacked star trails

A first attempt to stack multiple shorter exposures to produce one simulated long exposure.

Stacked star trails

This is composed of 4 images, ~10 minutes each, f/7.1 ISO 400. Loaded each image in GIMP using Open as Layers and combined each layer using the Hard Light mode. It seemed to give me the best result. Switched the image to Grayscale mode and saved.

The really bright streak is Jupiter.

One of these days I’ll make the effort to venture out to some place darker than my back yard.

Time to pick?

The little tomato hasn’t really gotten any bigger, but it’s almost all red now. I think it’s about ready to pluck off the vine.

Tomato01_20110720.JPG

The other tiny tomato hasn’t really changed much over the last few days.

Tomato02_20110720.JPG

Little tomato

One of my little tomatoes is starting to get a little bit of colour on the bottom.

Tomato01_20110715.JPG

The other one is still small, but getting bigger

Tomato02_20110715.JPG

1 tomato, 2 tomato

The tomatoling has grown bigger over the last few days

Small green tomato growing on a vine

and it’s been joined by another little tomatoling!

Small green tomato growing on a vine