Moon And Morning Star (2009 April 24)

[orin stepanek]

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090424.html

Two smiles in the sky; only you need a telescope to see the Venus crescent. At least I do. Still a very neat photo. Kind of like the Cheshire Cat has to baby sit the kitten. 8)

Orin

[neufer]

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090424.html

Two smiles in the sky; only you need a telescope to see the Venus crescent. At least I do.
Still a very neat photo. Kind of like the Cheshire Cat has to baby sit the kitten. 8)

It's a neat composite photo, isn't it?

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[apodman]

It's a neat composite photo, isn't it?

I don't know. The APOD description uses the word "composed", which can mean selected for inclusion in the photograph or made of separate photographs. The photographer uses the word "stacked" (and not clearly with regard to the version used for the APOD), which could mean combined images of the same whole subject or combined images of parts of the subject. Whether the ambiguity is deliberate or just clumsy, I still don't know.

[Chris Peterson]

It's a neat composite photo, isn't it?

Nope, it's a single frame, not composited in any way. The photographer is absolutely clear about this on his website:

"The first image links to the single frame selected as the NASA APOD for April 24, 2009. I picked the sharpest one frame from a pile of many I made intending to stack them for better clarity of the low-contrast Moon in the bright morning sky."

FWIW, I wouldn't necessarily consider a stack of images to be a composite, if it simply expands the dynamic range. Some cameras now do that internally (take two or more images and sum them), producing a single file. I'd usually reserve "composite" for what you get when combining images with different subjects in them, such as putting the Moon and Jupiter into the same image for purposes of scale. Virtually every astronomical image is a composite if that definition applies to a stack of images made at different exposure times and through different filters. It isn't generally considered necessary to identify them as such.

[neufer]

It's a neat composite photo, isn't it?

Nope, it's a single frame, not composited in any way. The photographer is absolutely clear about this on his website:

"The first image links to the single frame selected as the NASA APOD for April 24, 2009. I picked the sharpest one frame from a pile of many I made intending to stack them for better clarity of the low-contrast Moon in the bright morning sky."

A nice example of Mike Brown's "halo effect" in reverse
(plus, of course, the moon's low albedo to begin with).

[aristarchusinexile]

When I was a photographer for a newspaper composition was done in the viewfinder or by cropping in the darkroom during printing or enlargement.

[Chris Peterson]

When I was a photographer for a newspaper composition was done in the viewfinder or by cropping in the darkroom during printing or enlargement.

And that hasn't changed. Photographers still compose at the eyepiece, and again by cropping. The darkroom's not so dark anymore, and the photographer has more sophisticated tools, but the process really hasn't changed all that much.