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You most certainly are not. I wonder if you could get it done with some kind of manual HDR: tracing out the skyline to explicitly say "stuff below the line sho

You most certainly are not. I wonder if you could get it done with some kind of manual HDR: tracing out the skyline to explicitly say "stuff below the line should be from the low exposure photo, stuff above from the high exposure photo." Disclaimer: I know nothing about photography.

sp332 14y ago
The problem with light pollution is that the light bounces off of water, dust, and smog in the atmosphere, and back down into your eye/camera. So when you look up, the sky isn't darker, it's a lot brighter! You would need a way to subtract the extra light.
- crazygringo 14y ago
  Theoretically, it would basically be just a matter of subtracting the "general" light background, and then apply a deconvolution to the remaining "signal" to reduce blurry areas of light into point-like stars. However, deconvolution is one of those things that's great in theory, but almost impossible to pull off in practice, except under extremely controlled circumstances. And in this case, considering just how much dust/smog/etc. is in the atmosphere, and how it is non-uniform, I expect it would be simply impossible.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    There's a lot of that kind of stuff that goes into signal-cleaning in observatories, especially those located near major cities (like the Lick Observatory outside San Jose). But it tends to be pretty site/telescope-specific, full of in-house custom code, so I'm not sure if there's anything good that a regular photographer could use to produce the same effect.
- jcr 14y ago
  Though it won't help our eyes any time soon, something along the line of "Adaptive Optics" [1] could possibly address at least some of the issues you mentioned when creating images. Getting tech from the world's beset telescopes into consumer/pro camera gear might be asking a bit much at the moment, but eventually it could become possible. If it was done, a big issue would be having countless people shining lasers into the sky. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics

sp332 14y ago

The problem with light pollution is that the light bounces off of water, dust, and smog in the atmosphere, and back down into your eye/camera. So when you look up, the sky isn't darker, it's a lot brighter! You would need a way to subtract the extra light.

crazygringo 14y ago
Theoretically, it would basically be just a matter of subtracting the "general" light background, and then apply a deconvolution to the remaining "signal" to reduce blurry areas of light into point-like stars. However, deconvolution is one of those things that's great in theory, but almost impossible to pull off in practice, except under extremely controlled circumstances. And in this case, considering just how much dust/smog/etc. is in the atmosphere, and how it is non-uniform, I expect it would be simply impossible.
- _delirium 14y ago
  There's a lot of that kind of stuff that goes into signal-cleaning in observatories, especially those located near major cities (like the Lick Observatory outside San Jose). But it tends to be pretty site/telescope-specific, full of in-house custom code, so I'm not sure if there's anything good that a regular photographer could use to produce the same effect.
jcr 14y ago
Though it won't help our eyes any time soon, something along the line of "Adaptive Optics" [1] could possibly address at least some of the issues you mentioned when creating images. Getting tech from the world's beset telescopes into consumer/pro camera gear might be asking a bit much at the moment, but eventually it could become possible. If it was done, a big issue would be having countless people shining lasers into the sky. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics