Endless Possibility

Edit~

Re-Process and a whole hundred pixels bigger!



Common questions: 

Bigger?

No, sorry!



Is it real?

Yes. 

I used a tripod and cable release. It's actually a stitch of 3-4 images. The EXIF data is missing because I sometimes save in .PNG format for web like I did here. If you have any questions about the processing or shooting techniques used, ask!

The other version of this is now posted. The NR is a little strong on the other version which partly contributes to the difference but you can see big differences between the two especially in some of the aurora shapes. 

Where is this?

About 40km from a small town called Fort Smith near the Alberta/Northwest Territories border. The waterscape is a bend of the gargantuan Slave River (a mile across on average), which runs from mid-Alberta all the way into the Great Slave Lake.

The water empties from the Slave Lake and becomes the Mackenzie River, feeding into more separate lakes and rivers and underground waterways than you might imagine. Most of Canada's water, and a large portion of the worlds fresh water, can be found in this region and Canada's north in general. The Mackenzie continues northward, where it empties out into the Arctic Ocean.

The waterscape is not an ocean A few have made the mistake of thinking the shapes near the shore are waves. If you look closely you can see cracks in the "waves." It is just irregular shapes created on the spring ice because our melt takes several months.

Are there really that many (viewable) stars where I live in the night sky?

Technically, for the most part, yes. I estimate the image is around a couple stops brighter than visible with the naked eye. In complete darkness (in the absence of light from the blue spectrum), a protein called rhodopsin begins to accumulate in the rods of your eye, put simply. After about 40 minutes it reaches its peak and could be compared to raising the ISO sensitivity of a camera. This process is called dark adapting your eyes.

Combined with fully dilated pupils, the swath of the milky way and thousands of stars are visible. It is absolutely, insanely beautiful. I have been fascinated with it since I was young.