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Summer Aurora (18)
Garnetgirl Silver Note Writer [C: 5 W: 0 N: 20] (76)
I was very excited to try taking pictures of Aurora for the first time this summer. Near the end of our excursion in the wilds of the Yukon it started to get dark at the reasonable hour of 10 pm which meant that I was actually awake to watch for Aurora. These aurora were very vibrant and dancing away. This is my second attempt at photographing Aurora and I have problems with getting sharp focus on the stars even at infinity focal length. It's nearly impossible to try and have the foreground sharp because it is so difficult to see through the viewfinder. It may be due to the excessively long shutterspeed, shake while pressing the button...or something else. If anyone has any suggestions - please help!

No post-processing besides cropping
Altered Image #1

Garnetgirl Silver Note Writer [C: 5 W: 0 N: 20] (76)
Sharpen with High Pass Filter
Edited by:kwazireal Gold Star Critiquer/Gold Star Workshop Editor/Gold Note Writer [C: 114 W: 88 N: 54] (173)
Original image file is less than 100MB and therefore cannot be significantly improved.

However, in an effort to demonstrate a good alternative sharpening method for difficult but important images such as this, I proceeded as follows:

Make duplicate background layer.
Set Blend Mode to Hard Light (Note: Soft Light is the preferred blend mode for this technique, but this image does not have a large amount of significant detail but needs a significant amount of sharpening of the critical details).

Run High Pass Filter set to 2 pixels. (Note, on an image this small, the normal setting would have been 1 pixel, but this is more of a demo workshop than a perfection WS).

Flatten and save.

The result is not perfect, and the small file size brought out jpeg'ing (anti-aliasing) in the aroura, which was unintended but unavoidable for the purposes of this sharpening demo.