Sierra de Gredos as seen from the
Mirador Estelar (stargaze viewpoint) of Navarredonda de Gredos (Ávila, Spain) in midsummer. This area has got a dark sky Starlight Foundation certification, but unfortunately the southern view is plagued by light pollution from several cities of central Spain. At the cenit, some places in the peninsula still are relatively good, but unfortunately, we have
lost our horizons. See revision B for the original master image.
Light pollution in Spain is getting worse, fast. Nation-wide transition to LED made under old and not very bright (pun intended) central and autonomous regulations in matter of energetic efficiency and light pollution, and managed directly and independently by every town, cannot end well. New regulations are underway, but their drafts scared all the astronomy community (
1,
2).
I've used this particular untracked sequence to test the
background modeling script I've been developing over this last year. With the image revisions here you can have a glance of the resulting background model and the before/after images. I've included also the mask used to exclude the foreground during the background optimization (obtained by thresholding --in this particular case, it worked well because the foreground and the sky are well separated in the histogram-- and then cloning out the candle lights on the foreground). See this
blog post for a few more comments on the background extraction process for this particular image.
The final version is a composite of the sky, foreground, and me doing some selfie "postureo" as we would say here. Truth is I stumbled while climbing to the rock, heard the shutter, and immediately froze at some weird posture
.
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