I was very happy to get some imagery of Saturn from my 2013 fieldwork at the Carr Astronomical Observatory ready for inclusion at the MKG127 Gallery booth at the toronto international art fair this year (often I find myself insanely busy and miss it, which, you know, isn’t very smart if I care about my relationship with my dealer, which I do…)
some Saturn in the mix at Michael Klein’s booth at Art Toronto this year. Image courtesy MKG127 Gallery.
I produced a work in five parts, each 60×6″, chromogenic photographs mounted on di-bond. From 29 seconds of video (841 frames) I selected the sharpest 134 having used Photoshop to create the image stream. I then used Photoshop to stack them in four batches, making one final batch from those four to create the final stack. This was the first time I attempted to stack using Photoshop’s tools (last year I used Keith’s Image Stacker), and it’s not too bad, frankly. Only once I finally get a PC and can try out the wider range of software available will I be able to really compare the differences.
The five long pieces depict all of the 134 frames sequentially: quite lovely to see how the colour and quality of each individual frame changes, and how poor the quality of any given individual frame is by comparison with the stack.
The statement I sent along to Michael: Because the atmosphere causes noise in photographing astronomical objects, video is captured to allow for the selection of the cleanest frames, which are then stacked atop one another to create a sharper final image. 29 seconds of video were shot for this piece using a dSLR attached to my 8″ reflector telescope. This work, in five pieces, shows each of the cleanest frames and the resulting image stack. I used Photoshop to create an image sequence of the 841 video frames; visually assessed each and selected the cleanest frames; and layered frames in stages to produce the finished image stack.
Here is a low res version huge tiled file I sent to Toronto Image Works. Click to see it larger.
Imaging Saturn 2013
2013-06-14T22:14:39-22:15:08-04
And oh yes, I prepared and submitted a threesome of images I captured of M31 and M32 (Andromeda and companion) this summer, for this years Gallery TPW Photorama.
