Winter

My feeling was that given it was shot yesterday while standing in the snow in sub zero temperatures, I will always associate it with winter. I had other compositional goals in mind that would have been more obviously “winter” but the weather didn’t cooperate.

And you're entitled to your opinion, just as I am entitled to mine. And to me, this is a winter photo of which I am quite proud, and that is why I submitted it.

Thanks very much, I definitely lucked out with the weather. The other technique I used to pretty great effect involves using some (free) specialized planetary imaging software. Basically each moon in the composite is created out of a stack of 99 frames, and 15 dark frame exposures. The process I used is as follows. I used a program called Planetary Imaging PreProcessor (https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/) to automatically crop the raw frames around the moon, do dark frame averaging and subtraction, and compute a quality score for each frame. I then used a program called AutoStakkert! (https://www.autostakkert.com/) to stack numerous exposures into a single frame. Depending on the quality of the individual frames the stacks were comprised of the best 10-30 frames, a lot of trial and error here, and I'm sure if I actually had any idea what I was doing I could get better results. Then I used Registax (https://www.astronomie.be/registax/) to perform some basic histogram stretching and wavelet based sharpening. Also a lot of unguided tinkering here that could almost certainly be improved with actual knowledge of the program. I then loaded the sharpened frames into LR for a traditional LR & PS editing workflow. Lots I would improve next time since I was kind of winging it, but I'm pretty stoked on the result. Currently have a magnification test printing at a local photo lab here to see how large I can print it...fingers crossed for a 48" x 60"!