A Galactic Farewell to Summer

Image Title: A Galactic Farewell to Summer - and Not Only That…

Copyright: Salvatore Cerruto

Location: Marina di Modica, Sicily, Italy

Data Acquisition Method: Other

Description and Details:

During the session, and again in the following days, I was already thinking about how I would approach the post-processing in order to obtain the result I had in mind.
I had roughly planned the workflow: alignment, calibration and stacking in Siril, followed by refinement and blending with the landscape in Photoshop.
It is a workflow I have learned over the years through many hours of study, countless attempts, mistakes, and even entire projects discarded after spending hours in front of the computer.
The process has become fairly reproducible by now, but it can still require a very different amount of work each time. The starting conditions are never quite the same, and something that appears straightforward on paper can easily become much more complicated.

And this is where the second farewell begins…

After years of spending so many hours behind a computer processing my images, this time I decided to experiment with something different and put OpenAI's new frontier model, ChatGPT Astra, to the test. I downloaded the files from my SD card, organized them into just a couple of folders and, essentially, told it:
"Take care of it. These are my RAW files, these are the light frames, these are the dark frames, and this is the landscape. Use Siril and Photoshop and deliver the finished image."

The mouse cursor began moving on its own.

About ten minutes later, it presented me with a Milky Way image that I would have struggled to improve upon myself - and certainly not in ten minutes.

But most importantly, the image had not been artificially generated.

What I was looking at was already there, inside my files.
It was the signal I had actually captured a few nights earlier on my camera sensor. It was real light from the sky, light that had travelled through space, reached Earth, and been recorded during those hours spent beside the sea.
The artificial intelligence had not invented that Milky Way. It had worked with the real signal contained in my RAW files, trying to extract as much information from it as possible.
After only a few manual stylistic adjustments, the image was essentially complete. I would say that around 90 percent of the final work had already been done.

And from that moment on, a series of conflicting thoughts began to emerge - some positive, others much less so.
On one hand, perhaps I can finally devote more of my time to what I find most beautiful and rewarding about astrophotography: contemplating the night sky during an imaging session and discovering places where we become guests of darkness and silence, places where we can slow down and reconnect with the cosmos.
It is an experience that modern human beings are gradually losing.
On the other hand, there is a feeling that is difficult to ignore.
A machine can understand my intentions and perform the work better - or at least far more quickly - than I could do it myself.
The creative process of slowly revealing the sculpture hidden inside a rough block of marble, something that had been an integral part of my photography for years, suddenly seems as though it may no longer necessarily need me.

There is the excitement of having reached a new frontier, but also the bittersweet feeling of having left something behind.
The more enthusiastic part of me says that a new journey can only begin when something is left behind. The more cautious part wonders whether all of this could make me intellectually lazy, preventing me from continuing the path of study, experimentation, mistakes and countless hours of work that brought me to where I am today.
Perhaps, with time, these still-disordered thoughts will eventually converge into a new understanding.

But one thing seems certain:
the world - photography included, but certainly not photography alone - is changing at an unprecedented pace.

Technical data:
Nikon D800 + Sigma ART 35mm f/1.4
- 60 frames for the sky at f/4, ISO-1250, 45 seconds
- 8 frames for the foreground at f/4, ISO-800, 60 seconds
Post: Siril + Photoshop + ChatGPT Astra

Name: Salvatore Cerruto

Website, Instagram or Facebook Profile: https://www.instagram.com/salvatore_cerruto/