Penmachine

I've created a few high dynamic range (HDR) photographs recently, where I combine a series of exposures (usually 3 or 5) of different durations (and which therefore see different amount of detail in shadows and highlights) into a single tone-mapped image. But nothing like this:

Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day, that image, by Hartwig Luethen, combines 28 (!) pictures of last week's solar eclipse (visible mostly in northern Asia). The dynamic range is so great that the final image shows not only detail of the stupefyingly-hot corona of the Sun (photographed at 1/1000th of a second), but also features on the face of the Moon eclipsing it, lit only by the reflection from us, the Earth (photographed with a 2-second exposure).

That's pretty nifty-keen.

Labels: astronomy, geekery, hdr, photography, science