3 ms·

Get out into the wilderness sometime where there is no light pollution and take the time to look up. While 2000 may be the make without optical assistance, the

Get out into the wilderness sometime where there is no light pollution and take the time to look up. While 2000 may be the make without optical assistance, there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast things are. Simply stating "Fake", at least for me, downplays the point the photographer/artist is trying to make.

aaron695 14y ago
YES "there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast things are." So why fake it. Why show pretend scenes with orders of magnitude more stars then there should be. Why not just show real life and how the stars would look if Paris etc had the lights turned off. Why show a universe where somehow stars at hundreds of times more than they are. Isn't ours good enough? Anyone scientific/technical knows how stupid those pictures look, and anyone artistic has been away from city lights and knows what stars really look like. Why break from a great idea and create something so fake looking. Why not make them realistic and make a point on light pollution and the beauty we are missing out on. Why can't we appreciate the real universe and how great it is. Have we become that sad we need to make everything look like a scifi movie? At least have a couple of moons if you're going to go down that road.
- rplnt 14y ago
  Some of those can be seen with naked eye. Others are taken with longer exposure times (and using tracers (or multiple shots) to avoid this http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos/3003666.jpg http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos/3003666.jpg ). While we can call them fake, they are not fake in a sense that they don't capture the real thing.
  - aaron695 14y ago
    There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of the night sky? It implies if the lights go out you'd see around 100,000 stars. In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights. How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars? Even in the jpg you link you can see there's obviously one to two thousand stars tops in it. These pictures are from telescopes, the latter ones even have fake colors applied.
    - rplnt 14y ago
      > There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of the night sky? The first (or fourth) photo seems to me like naked eye would see. > In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights. You can see much more than that. Just the fact that you can see Milky Way can give it away (although you can't see individual stars, they are still stars) > How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars? The less bright ones, that you can't see with naked eye, will appear. Just take any regular camera, go out and take a 20s photo of the night sky. You'll see how much more stars you'll see. Yes, some of the pictures are zoomed in quite a lot, and I don't think they are colored though.
      - aaron695 14y ago
        Interesting I assumed the colours from star pictures are mostly faked / enhanced / thickened / filtered. I'll have to look into it more.
    - ra 14y ago
      Dude, they're not from telescopes and they're not 'fake' colours. Night sky images are produced by 'stacking' a large number of 1-2 second exposures on top of each other with software. This has the effect of intensifying light (making dim stars brighter) and increasing the intensity of the milky way (yes, those colours are true) without creating star trails (10 seconds is too long). To see this with the naked eye you need to spend at least 20 minutes outside in complete darkness to let your eyes adjust. You need no moon, no torch, no street lights, no light pollution. Only then can you see the nebulosity of the Milky Way (colors), and you will see literally 10-100,000 stars (not including other galaxies, the LMC or SMC). For some great examples of night sky photography see: http://500px.com/AaronGroen http://500px.com/AaronGroen
jstanley 14y ago
Actually, I agree with him. I've been in areas with no light pollution, and you can't see anything like that many stars.

aaron695 14y ago

YES "there is something humbling and awe inspiring about how vast things are." So why fake it. Why show pretend scenes with orders of magnitude more stars then there should be. Why not just show real life and how the stars would look if Paris etc had the lights turned off. Why show a universe where somehow stars at hundreds of times more than they are. Isn't ours good enough? Anyone scientific/technical knows how stupid those pictures look, and anyone artistic has been away from city lights and knows what stars really look like. Why break from a great idea and create something so fake looking. Why not make them realistic and make a point on light pollution and the beauty we are missing out on. Why can't we appreciate the real universe and how great it is. Have we become that sad we need to make everything look like a scifi movie? At least have a couple of moons if you're going to go down that road.

rplnt 14y ago
Some of those can be seen with naked eye. Others are taken with longer exposure times (and using tracers (or multiple shots) to avoid this http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos/3003666.jpg http://www.twanight.org/newTWAN/photos/3003666.jpg ). While we can call them fake, they are not fake in a sense that they don't capture the real thing.
- aaron695 14y ago
  There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of the night sky? It implies if the lights go out you'd see around 100,000 stars. In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights. How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars? Even in the jpg you link you can see there's obviously one to two thousand stars tops in it. These pictures are from telescopes, the latter ones even have fake colors applied.
  - rplnt 14y ago
    > There's probably 10,000 stars in the first photo that's supposed to be part of the night sky? The first (or fourth) photo seems to me like naked eye would see. > In real life you can see 2000 in the total night sky away from lights. You can see much more than that. Just the fact that you can see Milky Way can give it away (although you can't see individual stars, they are still stars) > How will a long exposure allow you to see more stars? The less bright ones, that you can't see with naked eye, will appear. Just take any regular camera, go out and take a 20s photo of the night sky. You'll see how much more stars you'll see. Yes, some of the pictures are zoomed in quite a lot, and I don't think they are colored though.
    - aaron695 14y ago
      Interesting I assumed the colours from star pictures are mostly faked / enhanced / thickened / filtered. I'll have to look into it more.
  - ra 14y ago
    Dude, they're not from telescopes and they're not 'fake' colours. Night sky images are produced by 'stacking' a large number of 1-2 second exposures on top of each other with software. This has the effect of intensifying light (making dim stars brighter) and increasing the intensity of the milky way (yes, those colours are true) without creating star trails (10 seconds is too long). To see this with the naked eye you need to spend at least 20 minutes outside in complete darkness to let your eyes adjust. You need no moon, no torch, no street lights, no light pollution. Only then can you see the nebulosity of the Milky Way (colors), and you will see literally 10-100,000 stars (not including other galaxies, the LMC or SMC). For some great examples of night sky photography see: http://500px.com/AaronGroen http://500px.com/AaronGroen

jstanley 14y ago

Actually, I agree with him. I've been in areas with no light pollution, and you can't see anything like that many stars.