A few weeks ago, my wife and I went on a tour into Yellowstone to photograph the night sky. Our guide was Harold Klein, from The West Yellowstone Camera Store.
We first drove to an overlook for the Lower Falls of the Yellowstone River, in the Canyon Village area. There we got set up, and Harold began teaching me the process that he follows for photographing the Milky Way. We began shooting in earnest at around 10:30 pm, which was, at that time, astronomical twilight. After that hour, the colors and brightness of the sky stabilize, so we wouldn’t have to adjust our settings between shots.
After shooting for an hour or so, we loaded back into the car and drove south to Grand Prismatic. We walked out a ways on the boardwalk, until we reached a spot where the Milky Way was reflected in the water in and around Grand Prismatic. We photographed there for some time, and then headed out.
My wife and I didn’t arrive home until about 3 am, but the result of the Grand Prismatic shoot was well worth the extremely late hour!
The above photo was was taken with a Nikon D500 and Tokina 11-20mm f2.8 lens, set to 11mm for the shot. The ISO was set to 6400, and the white balance set manually to 3,350. The image is actually the result of 16 photos, taken sequentially using interval shooting. Each photo was a 15 second exposure.
The individual photos were not bad, but each was marred by noise and artificial light sources. To get the end product, I imported the photos from the memory card with Nikon Transfer 2, then exported the raw photos to TIFF files.
Next, I used Starry Landscape Stacker (which you will find in the App Store, if you are lucky enough to have a Mac) to stack the images. Although the position of the stars in each photo shifted slightly in each frame, SLS was able to align the stars and combine the images, while also removing differences between the photos, such as noise or the moving light trails left by passing airplanes.
Final adjustments were done in Lightroom, resulting in the image you see above.