Starship Asterisk*

One of you might send an email to Jerry Bonnell or Robert Nemiroff (I'd try Jerry first right now) with your concerns about the description.

Received in an email from Dr. Nemiroff: We generally don't post photoshopped montages, but we do make mistakes on occasion.- RJN

Hope it is OK by him that I put it here, but I think it is good to know.

tom h

To clear up the confusion about the POV of this photo and these two mountains. This is a real place and I have been there. It is on highway 299 north/northeast of Redding (70 miles) about 7 to 10 miles out of McArthur heading away from Redding. Put those names in Google Maps or Earth. The photo is looking south/southwest. The geology of the area is made of a number lave flows hundreds of feet thick. The photographer is at the edge of one of these flows or benches. The dark horizon (as someone mentioned) are distant mountains that 299 crosses over coming from Redding. The image looks like it was shot in moon light or color corrected (bluish) for that effect. That the image is a composite does not bother me at all. Most of the images we see here are manipulated somehow to show some aspect that we could not see with our own eyes. I can't say what the Milky way would look like from this POV but the creativity of arcing from Lassen to Shasta is great.

BTW I liked this image so much I put it on my desktop.

Actually, my biggest "problem" with this image, from an artistic perspective (the author claims it's fiction after all and makes a point about what art should be) is that the horizon is not horizontal. It was the first thing I noticed. More even than the also obvious difference in hue and brightness between land and sky. From an artistic perspective I don't care if the image is real or not, but it's the first landscape made by a "pro" I see that fails to maintain a horizon line the way it should be. The author may claim that he didn't fix it because that was part of his vision, but I honestly would have a hard time thinking that's the case. To me it's a rather amateurish oversight. Whether the image qualifies for an APOD is not for us to decide, but I was surprised to see so much talk about whether fiction is allowed here, and when it came to spot something so basic, nobody, starting from the author, actually noticed it. No doubt most people here must be scientists

MAB wrote:Actually, my biggest "problem" with this image, from an artistic perspective (the author claims it's fiction after all and makes a point about what art should be) is that the horizon is not horizontal.

I think the image is better that way. In reality, the horizon is not horizontal at this location- the mountain range is distant at the left and gets closer as it moves to the right, with the foreground valley low and distant to the left and high and near to the right. To me, this is aesthetically pleasing; it's how I'd shoot the scene in daylight.

Chris Peterson wrote:I think the image is better that way. In reality, the horizon is not horizontal at this location- the mountain range is distant at the left and gets closer as it moves to the right, with the foreground valley low and distant to the left and high and near to the right. To me, this is aesthetically pleasing; it's how I'd shoot the scene in daylight.

Well, I won't argue about what pleases you aesthetically, and if that's your view, I'd concede that this might also be the vision of the artist, but the image does not hold the perspective even in the situation you describe. A horizon line, not to be mistaken with a horizontal line defining the separation between land and sky, is horizontal by definition, slightly curved at best. This horizon line is tilted,and the tilt is unrelated to the characteristics of the landscape AFAICT. If you rotate the image it 1.3 degrees, the features on the left will still be lower than the features on the right, but the perspective and the horizon line are better resolved. Panoramas can be tricky, especially because panorama stitching software sometimes warps the landscape. Many photo stitching apps even attempt to guess what the horizon line is, for a reason. In any case, I don't think this panorama was successfully resolved from this point of view and I think if we asked anyone with experience shooting landscapes they would likely agree.