Rodney Campbell's Blog

More Over – Mercator Projection

Note: These photographs (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger. To see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer click any of the images.

I know I’d mentioned previously that I had taken eight (8) exposures of each of the ten (10) frames for this panorama. Consisting of two rows of five vertical overlapped frames to cover the entire milky way arch

When shooting my original intention was to star stack the sets of eight common frames to reduce noise. Previously I just chose the best exposure from each set and stitched them

This is the result of stacking each set of 8 frames and then panorama stitching the ten stacked compositions

For the star stacking for noise reduction I used a software package on my Mac which is more automated (than using Photoshop layers). For this I recently purchased Starry Landscape Stacker which appears to work very well

There is one other difference with this panorama (besides having considerably less noise across the image – especially in the background sky). In my previous stitching I used a spherical projection for the panorama. This gave it a wider more vertically squashed view. However it also introduces a problem of heavily stretched and smeared stars across the top portion of the frame that you have to crop out. This is because this area forms the top of the spherical projection

With this panorama I used a Mercator projection which produces much less star distortion across the top portion of the frame. Which basically means I get nice sharp stars right up into the corners of the frame