Featured on NASA's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) March 14th, 2011. This image marks a time of change for space exploration. We see the Space Shuttle Discovery crossing the night sky (bottom trail) hours after it undocked from the International Space Station (top trail). Less than a day after this image was taken, Discovery landed on Earth and was put into retirement. Special care has been taken in processing this photo. The field of view is nearly 180 x 90 degrees, or half of the sky which is above the horizon. To give a better perspective, the far left of the image corresponds to the direction NW and the far right of the image is ESE. Discovery and the ISS were only separated (width) by less than 2 degrees. At their highest point, they were 71 and 72 degrees above the horizon. A careful combination of automatic and manually alignment and transformations was needed to project the 3-dimensional environment onto this 2-dimensional image.
Location: Sprague Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO Date: 2010-09-25 Camera: Canon XSi (modified) Lens: Sigma 20mm f/1.8 Mount: Still Tripod, Astrotrac Shot: Mosaic 14x20 seconds f/2.8 ISO 1600 20x120 seconds f/3.5 ISO 1500 Processing: PtGUI, Photoshop, Topaz
Location: State Forest State Park, CO Date: 2010-08-27 Camera: Canon XSi (Hap Griffin Modified) Lens: Sigma 20mm f/1.8 Mount: Still Tripod Shot: 6x20 seconds f/2.8 ISO 1600 Processing: Photoshop, Topaz DeNoise 5
