[Mika]

We got pretty good Aurora Borealis today, green, yellow and red lights.

The bad news? I was climbing, and missed the good bits, only to see the faint flaring.

The worse news? I did not have a camera with me.

The worst news? The show was over once I got back home.

[watsisname]

D'awww.

With solar max just around the corner I imagine there will be many more chances.  All I've ever seen of it was the slightest hint of red over the horizon some years back when there was that massive solar flare.  Would love to see a proper display.

Hmm, if only I could change the Earth's magnetic axis.

[watsisname]

for comet!




L4/PanSTARRS has just swung around the sun and is starting to become visible from the northern hemisphere.  It was very hard to pick out of the twilight though, and I could only see it with a spotting scope.  I doubt I would have ever found it if not for the crescent moon being helpfully located close by.  With a camera it can be easily captured; I used a 2-2.5 second exposure at ISO 400-800.

[Herra Tohtori]

It's the dark days of the year again and I am spending winter holidays relatively far away from light pollution.

Add in the fact that my parents got a new camera last summer, an Olympus mini-dslr model. They also have three objectives for it - the regular wide angle objective, a zoom objective that is pretty good and came bundled with the camera, and a third objective that they decided to also get - a macro-objective which has some ridiculously good optics (60mm, F2.8)... The only problem with this sweet camera is that it doesn't have an optical view finder and trying to get it to focus to infinity is a real problem.

I took some photos today, and although the full moon hampered my efforts I did get some nice shots. I expect better success in two weeks when the Moon doesn't light up the entire sky... provided I get some clear nights, of course.

[Scourge of Ages]

oooooooooh

[watsisname]

Nice!  You even got 2 of the Jovian moons.

[Herra Tohtori]

I actually sort of got all of them in another picture, but it was so boring otherwise that I didn't include it on the post.

They all happened to be sort of clustered on the left side of the planet (as seen from northern hemisphere anyway) and two of them very close to each other. Jupiter is bright! I might try out what happens if I use much lower exposure time and smaller aperture, to see if I can get any surface detail into the picture... right now the brightness of the planet basically saturates the CCD and there's just a big blob of light surrounded by diffraction effects.

I was pretty happy that the bright core of M42 was so well visible on the photos of Orion's sword though. It would be really cool to have a good tracking mount. And I wouldn't mind having a filter of some kind to circumvent some of the atmospheric phenomena.

[watsisname]

This thread cannot die.  Some shots I took over this summer with the Canon Rebel T3 and standard zoom lenses.

[perihelion]

Oooooooh...  Pretty...

[Herra Tohtori]

 


Good Yuletide for everyone! It's time to update this thread again with a few pictures I took two nights ago.









Too bad I didn't think of using the better camera, that could have gotten rid of a lot of the noise... as it is I had to use quite hefty amount of noise removal for these. They are also slightly enhanced - the red wasn't really visible to the naked eye, but to get the overall contrast to appear approximately like they did for naked eye, that ended up showing a bit more.


Taken with Canon SX130 IS, with CHDK to enable RAW photography. 15 seconds exposure, F3.4, ISO80, objective fully "zoomed out" (5.0mm)

[Flipside]

Lovely stuff, last one needs more Lucifer though

[Herra Tohtori]

Took some shots with an Olympus E-PL5 mini-DSLR with 60mm F/2.8 objective. It is an awesome little camera, too bad it isn't mine.

Hyades and Pleiades:






Cropped, non-resized shot of the Pleiades. Pretty boring actually, I really should get a tracking mount telescope or something. Short exposures just don't capture much of the faint details.




Two exposures (shorter and longer) of Perseus, with those lovely star clusters in the middle.






Flashy favourite, the great Orion nebula, or M42. The lower picture is a cropped, non-resized version.






A few exposures of M31. Short ones don't really bring out the proper size of the galaxy, but long exposures would not show any details and the stars would be badly streaked. The bottom one is a cropped, non-resized composite from four 10 second exposures. It also looks like the M110 elliptical dwarf galaxy is also barely visible on two o'clock position from the M31 itself.









And two original resolution versions of the Orion pics:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/131849120/PC284279_large.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/131849120/PC284280_large.png

[Scourge of Ages]

Ooooooooh, nice.

[watsisname]

Very pretty shots!  Especially M31 and M42, which are always fun and interesting targets, and you captured their colors well.  (And yes, I do see M110 there, and also M32, which is at ~6 o'clock.  M110 is larger but fainter, and M32 looks almost like a star.  See here for reference).  As for M45, yeah, it's rather boring in comparison.  I've given it a try a few times, but it really needs much longer exposures to get the fainter members and nebulosity, which isn't practical without a tracking mount.

Also, I'm jealous of that lens.   60mm at f/2.8 is not bad!  For my M31 shot above I used a telephoto zoom lens (50-250mm), but it can only do f/4.0 minimum, which is pretty slow.  I'm hoping to give the Rokinon 16mm f/2.0 lens a try soon, which should be awesome for shooting the Milky Way.

Finally, a few more images taken this year that I never shared.
imgur album

[watsisname]

Went out to test my new wide angle lens on the Milky Way.  Got this:



Details:
Canon Rebel T3 with Rokinon 16mm f/2.0 lens
Seven 13s frames at f/2.0 6400ISO


I also accidentally photographed a comet I didn't know was there:


Hello Lovejoy!

[Scourge of Ages]

"So I just accidentally photographed a comet, lol!"

That is impressive and I'm a little jealous.

[Herra Tohtori]

Comet! I suppose it would be better to refer to it as C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) rather than simply by its common name, since there was another Lovejoy a few years ago.


I meant to post this during the holidays, but never remembered.



Un-resized crop, taken with the same Olympus camera as previous shots, but with a teleobjective. Can't remember the exact settings but I think the objective was a 250mm one.

[watsisname]

^Hello Luna, I see Tycho and Copernicus on your sweet manly face.

In a cloudy wet pattern here, so in these days away from shooting I work on processing technique.  Here's a result from combining Regim (freeware astronomical calibration and stacking software) with Gimp (post editing):

Raw image:


Processed stack:


Impressive amount of enhancement to the faint stars and dust lanes, considering the amount of light pollution -- low to the horizon and toward the city from a suburban (Bortle 5) sky.

[watsisname]

Some new astrophotos for you all to enjoy.  These include last night's lunar eclipse, the Milky Way, and, for my first time, the Aurora.



animated

My personal favorite:


Hoping to get out into the dark country some more in these next few months.  The galactic center is starting to get nice and high above the horizon in the predawn hours (for us northerners), and is such an amazing sight and fun to capture.

[Scourge of Ages]

Nice shot of the moon, there!