Fiery Caldera

Most of the night, my friend and I shot short exposures. We knew we could use them as stand-alone images, in a timelapse, or a star trail image as we were facing North while on the South Rim of the park. Before leaving, while the aurora activity had exploded with vivid reds, I stopped the camera to ensure everything was level (tripod and camera) before changing camera settings to include long exposure noise reduction (LENR). I rotated the camera 5 times for the 5 frames I needed. It was a beautiful way to spend the evening but quite chilly too. And with a 2-hour drive back to our respective valleys, we sadly packed up while it was still active.

An astro-modified Canon R6 camera on a Really Right Stuff tripod

This is a panorama of 5 photos stitched together in Photoshop. In the field, I used long exposure noise reduction on each panel as I wanted to get as clean a shot as possible. In Lightroom, I brought up the shadows and the blacks a little before stitching the 5 photos in Photoshop. It was still a little noisy, so I brought down the grain a bit with Topaz Denoise, a plug-in to Photoshop before saving the image back to LR. Finished!