PigleT's witterings : astronomy

Cobalt blue

One of my favourite colours is a cobalt-blue sky after dusk.

Even better if it can have a nice silvery crescent moon in it, too.

cobalt blue sky and moon

Moon HDR (a composite of 3 images made in FDRGui)

This article was written on 2009-05-30 at 23:05:58, in the Pigsty, listening to the fans whirring, feeling hot.

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More sunspots

According to SpaceWeather, there appear to be 3 sunspots on the go at present - 987, 988 and 989. Although solar cycle 24 has begun, these are not cycle-24 spots as their magnetic polarity associates them with old cycle 23.

So I got a couple of photos anyway:

sunspots 987, 988, 989

sunspots 987, 988, 989

Both 987 and 988 come in obvious pairs, working from the centre towards the extremity; 987 is very faint, continuing the line towards the circumference.

(Nikon D200 dSLR, 70-300mm VR lens, ISO200, 1/250th at f/5.6, Baader and 2-stop ND filter, significant contrast-enhancement in photoshop.)

This article was written on 2008-03-27 at 15:03:30, in the Pigsty/Office, listening to the fan whirring, feeling alive.

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Astro-something

I finally worked out how to use a bunch of connector tubes to attach my D200 to my Bausch and Lomb Criterion 4000 Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector telescope. (If anyone's interested, I think I got them from Speedgraphic.)

It seems a pretty heath-robinson arrangement to me, with the nikon-to-T2 adaptor (standard fare) and tubes screwed around the eyepiece tube, but it seems to have worked.

Took me a little while to remember how to align the mount (you set the declination to 90 degrees and tilt the tripod to angle the base so it points at the pole star) but I almost eliminated trails given the length of exposure.

Metering by complete guess method - ISO1600 for 30s gave me this photo of stars in Orion.

I also made this funny photo of mars with lens-flare off the eyepiece. I'll call it art :)

It'll suffice for a first attempt.

This article was written on 2008-02-04 at 23:02:22, in the Pigsty, listening to the clock ticking, feeling chilly.

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Fuzzball

Couldn't resist a starry night. Had to look for Comet 17P/Holmes.

Think I found it despite the rather bright moon nearby, too:

3-second exposure (cropped)

6s exposure

Nikon d200, 70-300mm VR lens at 300mm, ISO 1600, f/5.6 (max), standard NR. Straight off the camera, no photoshop trickery.

Guess it is naked-eye then!

This article was written on 2007-10-28 at 21:10:54, in the Pigsty, listening to the fan whirring, feeling hungry.

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Little points of light

Very early on Saturday morning I drove up to Glen Affric in time for sunrise. I didn't get the autumn mist and light I'd hoped for (guess that means that's rarer than expected), but did find an unexpected opportunity for some simple astrophotography instead.

They're not helped by being out of focus (and fully wide at f/2.8, at that) but I'm reasonably pleased with:

Orion amongst pine trees

Orion, Arcturus in the Hyades, Pleiades - illustrating the linear arrangement of the well-known asterisms

Venus and Saturn - a reasonable fusion of landscape with Venus and Saturn showing (brightly!) through a gap in the motion-blurred clouds.

You can view the whole lot here: Glen Affric autumn colours.

This article was written on 2007-10-15 at 11:10:19, in the Pigsty/Office, listening to Runrig - Everything You See, feeling recovering.

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Shiny

I *thought* the moon and Venus looked quite spangly close together fairly low in the sky (well, above the neighbours' house), last night.

So I tried a couple of photos; the best ones are the extremes, high-key and low-key detail. Attempts to do HDR proved unsuccessful as I wasn't using a tracking 'scope mount and the blighters kept moving between shots..

Seems davep's written it up too.

This article was written on 2007-05-20 at 22:05:52, in the Pigsty, listening to the clock ticking, feeling indescribable.

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Lunar Eclipse March 2007: the movie

Some selected highlights of key points of the lunar eclipse:

full moon, before everything got underway

encroaching shadow - 3 minutes into umbra

bite out of moon - 20 minutes into the umbra phase

borderline totality - just 2 minutes before totality, with a tiny amount of bright white sunlight remaining on the top of the moon. The star in the bottom-right is 56 Leo.

borderline totality - just one minute into totality.

surrounding stars - 6 minutes into totality, showing an orange/red moon and several surrounding stars down to magnitude ~6.5 or so.

end of totality - 7 minutes after totality finished, showing the return of sunlight around the left edge, and a few surrounding stars.

more contrast - taken 9 minutes after the end of totality, to demonstrate the large different in contrast between shadow and highlights.

However, the real fun has been producing this movie of the eclipse (1.3M). I've roughly aligned each image so the moon is supposed to remain in the same place in each frame, although there's some experimental error.

Equipment: Nikon D200 with 70-300mm VR lens

Software: ImageMagick, some custom ruby scripts, ffmpeg.