Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Milky Way, Zodiacal Light, Venus, Orionid and stars

Milky Way, Zodiacal Light, Venus, Orionid and stars[edit]

Reason: It is a remarkable image, which shows a night sky photographed in relatively dark place. The image has encyclopedic and educational value. It shows many interesting things like meteor, Milky way, Zodiacal Light. Even well known Venus is interesting to compare to other objects in the night sky to see how bright she is.
Proposed caption: Every October the Earth is orbiting through a stream of dust from Halley's Comet, the source of the annual Orionids meteor shower. Orionids got its name because the radiant, the point where meteors appear to originate from, located in the constellation Orion. At the image you could see Milky Way - our home galaxy, Zodiacal light - a faint glow, which appears after evening and before morning twilight, and of course the Meteor trail. The bright star just above the horizon is actually planet Venus. Venus is the brightest object in the night sky after the Moon.
Articles this image appears in: Orionids
Creator: Mbz1

Support as nominator Mbz1 02:50, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I know the image is very, very noisy. I used ISO 1600 otherwise it is hard to capture a meteor with a 8 mm fisheye lens and aperture 3.5. I wish you could see beyond the noise. It was an incredible night filled with the stars and meteors. Special note to Mick: you would see that the image was posted to the article today (the nomination with short legs?) Not exactly. First of all today I simply replaced my own image with my own image. Second of all looks like almost all meteors pictures (not only Orionids) were uploaded by me. I know the image would probably get opposed, but, if while it is nominated, at least one person would learn something new, my work for creating the nomination will not be lost. Thank you.--Mbz1 03:19, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Is it just me or is this awfully over-exposed for Astronomical photo? If you had used like ISO400 in RAW mode and played with curves a bit it would look a lot better. Also I don't get what you're trying to do in here. It's sunset/dawn and the sky is bright, so there's absolutely no point of going to a dark place to shoot this. --antilived^{T | C | G} 07:38, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- The zodiacal light isn't going to be visible except from a dark site. I think a lot of the "overexposure" you're seeing is the Milky Way and the zodiacal light, which are important components of the photograph. -- Coneslayer 11:14, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Thank you for the comments,Antilived and thank you very much for doing my work for me,Coneslayer . I should have explained myself how one takes image of meteors: Of course one goes to the darkest place one could find because not only Milky Way and Zodiacal Lights, but also most meteors would get lost in light polluted places. The low horizon would also help because many Orionids flaying low. Then one opens a shutter, looks at the sky and waits until a meteor flies by. As soon as meteor does, one closes the shutter. That's why all my images of meteors look different. This one, for example is much darker than the nominated one simply because a meteor has flown in 7- 10 seconds after I opened the shutter. Of course neither Milky Way nor Zodiacal Lights are seen at the image - only bright stars and a meteor. If I used ISO 400, I would not have been able to capture the meteor at the nominated image. I know I tried! Please see how much dimer the meteor is comparing to other objects in the sky.I'd like to add that for photographing Milky Way and Zodiacal Lights I could have used much lower ISO with the longer exposure time. This technique does not work with meteors. One cannot take a time exposure of a meteor. Meteor's flight takes a split of a second and then you capture one on film or you do not.I do have a raw file, but I'm not photo shop specialist. I have no idea how to work with the curves. If anybody wants to try, I could e-mail the image. Thank you.
- No I mean using exact same aperture and shutter speed, but using ISO400 or ISO800 speed (ie. a stop or 2 darker). Compare your picture to Image:Cantin1.jpg and you can see that the sky is actually dark, instead of bled through like in yours. Stars are mostly 1 or 2 pixel in diameter but if you overexpose it the light will bleed through, creating fuzz around the star and look rather bad. Usually I purposely under-expose them, preserving some colour information, and push it up later in curves instead. I agree that it's hard to capture meteors but maybe you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting the milky way in the background of meteor showers instead of some nice relatively empty spaces. --antilived^{T | C | G} 05:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  - The thing is that in astro photography post processing of the image is almost as important as the taking of the image. If I were taking pictures of Milky Way or Zodiacal Lights only, I could have taken few short exposures and then stack images together in photo shop. I cannot stack images with meteors. As I explained I waited for a meteor to fly by before closing my shutter. In the nominated image exposure time was about 40 second or so. Of course it is overexposed yet you still could see well all the subjects of the image. If you go to Orionids article and take a look at the other my pictures, you would see that they all have different colors because the exposure time was very different. Some of them are very dark and still show a meteor, but IMO the nominated image is more interesting because it shows Milky way, Zodiacal Light, Venus and Orionid in relation to each other. Of course the image is very far from perfect and even more far from FP quality standards, yet IMO the image has high encyclopedic and educational value that may mitigate technical problems. Once I've read in Commons FP criteria something like this: "A bad image of a difficult subject is s better image than a good image of an ordinary subject." Have I been in a wrong place at the wrong time? No. I probably was in the best place at the best time. I saw dozens of meteors. I could have turned my camera away from Milky Way and Zodiacal lights and still capture meteors, but I did not want to do it in purpose. It was an amazing scene - zodiacal lights touching Milky Way and I wanted to capture it on film. Thank you again,Antilived, for your comment and your interest in the image. Please feel absolutely free to oppose the image. It is overexposed and it is very noisy.--Mbz1 13:26, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
    - It depends on your perspective really, if the subject is simply the meteoroids then I would want to get a relatively empty background instead of having the milky way in just for the sake of it. It's like inside a church and you want to get both the dark sculptures and the stained glass windows, except you only get 1 shot instead of many to make HDR. However if it's not necessary, 2 separate photos of the subjects separated would be better/easier than trying to get everything in. --antilived^{T | C | G} 04:19, 2 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Is that huge, bright, round splotch in the lower edge really Venus? Looks like the moon... ;-) There are serious technical flaws in this picture, so I can't support - even though it's a nice shot, showing a lot at once. --Janke | Talk 20:09, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- It is a good point about Venus looking as the Moon. The thing is that, if the Moon (even half Moon) were present at that time, it would have been much, much harder to capture Milky Way, Zodiacal Light and a meteor because the Moon gives too much light. Even most stars would have been lost. The Moon set before the image was taken. Thank you for the vote, Janke.--Mbz1 20:30, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, sorry, but the technical quality is far too low, even for a picture like this. --Aqwis 22:45, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]
- There's nothing to be sorry about. Thank you for the vote.--Mbz1 23:54, 1 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not promoted MER-C 11:18, 7 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]