Evening constellation shot looking north, bracketed by trees.
Two asterisms are visible: the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper...which are part of the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(astronomy)
I only wanted to capture a small number of stars so that the asterism patterns would not be lost in the clutter. Shooting in twilight makes fainter stars less detectable.
To make the stars more visible, especially on smaller screens (cell phones), I did the following image processing:
- blur (Gaussian)
- dilate filter
- blur
- dilate
- blur
The first blur operation was to smooth out the high spatial frequency noise.
Dilate filter expands the size of stars, but also makes them more square instead of round...so...
...you need another blur operation after every dilate operation.
Enjoy!