Sunset through starlight with a fire

Experiment in merging several panoramas acquired over the course of a few hours. Six pans from sunset through dusk and twilight and into a dark (moonlit night) were stitched in PTGui, then combined in Photoshop, highlighting the mountains in the setting sun, and the starry sky and Fuller Fire (at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon) in the dark of night.

It was an experiment, and there are flaws (windy weather, early moonrise, shortcuts in the Photoshop processing, etc.). The main point of the exercise was to figure out the basics of the process. Because the tripod shifted a small amount during the evening, I treated the sets as non-linked HDR exposures. Unfortunately, PTGui wanted to merge the photos with similar exosures (i.e., the night shots) into a single blend plane, so I ended up exporting each of the six panoramas separately. It did do a beautiful job of aligning each set of shots so I could stack them in Photoshop for the final edits.