Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — Loran Hughes Astrophotography

It's been a little slow around here in the astrophotography world. First, we adopted a dog from our local Humane Society. Koda is a year old lab-terrior mix and a real sweetheart. She's rapidly getting used to her new home and, as you might guess, keeping us real busy.

Secondly, we're in the midst of our wildfire season and we've got smoke - which doesn't make for good seeing. We had a pretty decent thunderstorm roll through this past weekend and there are currently 68 active fires in our area, all started by lightning.

The Green Top Mountain Fire is about 16 1/2 miles from the Westwood Driveway Observatory.

Green Top Mountain Fire, July 15, 2018. 300mm, f16, ISO 100, 6-25 second exposures.

The photo of this 125 acre fire is a stacked image made up of eight time exposures ranging from 6 to 25 seconds, then sharpened with a high-pass filter in Photoshop. It turns out that techniques used in astrophotography work pretty well for terrestrial nightscapes too.

Anyway, the Oregon Department of Forestry and the US Forest Service are hitting these fires with all they've got. These folks are real heroes in my book. Clear skies will be back soon enough.

Update

Shortly after I wrote this, I had to evacuate my 94 year-old mother out of the way of this:

Fortunately, we're all safe and ultimately her area of town wasn't threatened. But it sure got the adrenaline flowing!