Darkened cities

I remember the first time I saw the night sky in complete darkness, ever since then I have fantasized about this happening in a large city like that.

The complete and utter darkness is bizarre, I remember it was a new moon and I was camping in the middle of the desert in Wadi Rum, Jordan. It was so dark, that I couldn't see my hands in front of my face; I couldn't see my friends who were walking beside me. Looking up, i had the immense feeling of my insignificance and tininess, and felt as if I was on the verge of falling into the night sky.

Very, very cool.

reply to post by GrandStrategy


Wow, claiming the images are poorly done, then providing a worse example of your own but at the same time hiding behind excuses of not spending enough time, does not bode well.

It is exactly the spend time which is commendable. Thiery Cohen took the time to travel to a place on the same latitude of given city, and used the same angle of the city picture. Then he took efforts to process these pictures where the city is not merely a black silhouette like in your picture, but details are clearly visibly. Also reflection in the waters are synced with the background.

Next time I would think twice before making degrading comments about someones efforts

Growing up, I would visit my family out in the Arizona desert. I remember nights where you could easily see the Milky Way!

Now, living out in the country, I still have been able to see the Milky Way, but not as defined as it was when I was a child out in the desert...

in the upper peninsula of michigan and in camp sites in the northern/central portion of the lower peninsula, you can see so many stars it's shocking. even though i was raised on a lake with a fairly low population in a small town, some 30 miles away from any major city in any direction, the best you could see were the main stars for the dippers and so forth. but up north, there were so many stars you couldn't even find the big and little dippers. just a sheet of thousands and thousands of points of light. was a little hard to absorb it all, there was so much.

reply to post by GrandStrategy


Lets see if you understand this.

I know photoshop inside out... thats not the point.

The thing here is to reproduce the sky exactly as it would be from THAT point of view - the sky is not the same in my location and yours - we're prolly at least 6 hours apart - the sky from tokyo is completely different from the sky in western europe. Stars, constellations, position of the milky way, orientation, tilts etc.

What you should do, is grab the exact coords of some place and make the composition as if it was the exact sky view from that particular location - not just grabbing a picture of saturn and place it over the NY skyline at noon and say "if it was dark, december 24th 2012 at noon, saturn would appear like this" - well... saturn may not even be there!

So what I said to you is... find the coords, figure out all the variables, etc (use that skymap or that cool astro software software ppl use that allows to see "whats visible" from anywhere, insert that places coords, check what appears, THEN... find a good sky photo of that very same place)

EDIT: good luck btw... and uh... I'm not funding your little "expedition"

As a city dwelling star gazer I absolutely love the OP's photos and link!

Sadly, because of street lighting and cloud cover in my home town most of the year we rarely get to see the beauty of the heavens in all their glory.

Breathtaking. If only we could remove the veil.

Originally posted by chrismir
I found the following on the net and wanted to share....

Could you imagine a sight of big cities at night, with as background the milky-way in full bloom? For that all light should be off and that ain't gonna happen until the next Carrington event (come'on sun, you can do it

)

Thiery Cohen decided not to wait for that and created some quality processed images to provide this very image. He did not merely use random sky images, but images from exact the same latitude and angle as the city-images.

Some examples:

An additional 15 images can be found; Thiery Cohen - Darkened cities

Awesome find but we are missing a few things! We are missing the rioters, looters and fires!
Oh and all the emergency vehicles! Possibly the national guard, marines, navy, army and airforce!
With all that I'm afraid there might be a wee bit of light pollution! Oh and the NY smog! Did i forget anything else?
Well I guess that would be like a pic from that show life after humans but who would take the photo?

This is just incredibly beautiful to see. S&F for this OP as I've always wanted to envision what it would be like if we could see a clearer galaxy within a darken city and you just provided me a means to what I've always wanted to see. Again, thank you!

reply to post by GrandStrategy


I didnt really think that one out did i ?

sorry about that

reply to post by chrismir


Pretty. I miss seeing the stars, out in the mountains it looks like this but only on very clear nights. Nice find.

Originally posted by FraternitasSaturni

The thing here is to reproduce the sky exactly as it would be from THAT point of view - the sky is not the same in my location and yours - we're prolly at least 6 hours apart - the sky from tokyo is completely different from the sky in western europe. Stars, constellations, position of the milky way, orientation, tilts etc.

What you should do, is grab the exact coords of some place and make the composition as if it was the exact sky view from that particular location - not just grabbing a picture of saturn and place it over the NY skyline at noon and say "if it was dark, december 24th 2012 at noon, saturn would appear like this" - well... saturn may not even be there!

So what I said to you is... find the coords, figure out all the variables, etc (use that skymap or that cool astro software software ppl use that allows to see "whats visible" from anywhere, insert that places coords, check what appears, THEN... find a good sky photo of that very same place)

I'm not disputing the accuracy, what I'm saying is that the end result is crap. Now if you want to commend the concept, or that fact he can work his way around a map, be my guest, but his talent starts and stops there - all the effort he put in beforehand is wasted, because he's seemingly incapable of blending a few images together.

What I would say to you is... bugger off! I am not going to spend unforeseeable hours of my time, to maybe or maybe not appease arrogant ATS members who can't come to terms with their sub-par eye sight.

Originally posted by chrismir
Wow, claiming the images are poorly done, then providing a worse example of your own but at the same time hiding behind excuses of not spending enough time, does not bode well.

It is exactly the spend time which is commendable. Thiery Cohen took the time to travel to a place on the same latitude of given city, and used the same angle of the city picture. Then he took efforts to process these pictures where the city is not merely a black silhouette like in your picture, but details are clearly visibly. Also reflection in the waters are synced with the background.

Next time I would think twice before making degrading comments about someones efforts

It's not an excuse that I spent 10 minutes, it's a statement of fact. I don't know what exactly you would expect from a 10 minute job. Very few could do better than what I did in that time, given 8 minutes of it is used cutting out buildings! It seems obvious to me that you don't really know what you're talking about if you think the poor quality is a reflection of anything but the time frame.

You must be smoking something.

I can build a better conservatory than most people, but that doesn't mean I'm going to spend a few days doing it with money I do not have, with time I do not have, just to prove it to whoever is daft enough to dispute it.

Thiery Cohen has done a terrible job. That's just the bottom line. The execution is awful. He'd have been better off taking his photographs and then leaving the photo manipulations to someone who knows what they're doing.

Was the whole meaning of this thread about how well the photoshop job was done? You picked out one aspect of the image and burned it off. Very uncalled for and never the intent of my thread.

Now please go find a mirror and yell. 'I'm the best!, I'm better than anyone else!' :p