It was a dark and stormy night...wait a minute...it was a clear and calm
night; the night sky glistened with the light from thousands of streetlights
releasing billions upon billions of photons, only to be scattered by the
atmosphere and to rain down upon Ann Arbor --- to pollute the otherwise
perfect night sky. So, Jeff, a twenty-odd year old who can be best described
using Dungeons & Dragons character alignment as "chaotic good," decided that
it was time to escape the particle bombardment to attempt the astronomically
difficult, and equally arcane, task known as astrophotography...
Anyway...Here are the exposure details and the photos (from February 24,
2009):
826 seconds
f/3.5
ISO 800
Nikon D70
18-70mm @ 18mm (35mm equiv: 27mm)
Location: McCollum Rd, MI
Here's the same photo, but with a very well known constallation outlined.
This is essentially a follow up to a previous post.
As it turns out, the big gray-ish blob commonly referred to as Luna, or even more commonly referred to as the Moon, is still there. As always, it seems to hide about once every 4 weeks.
The other day, I read somewhere that the moon was going to appear bigger than usual. When I got home, I ran outside, saw that it wasn't cloudy, and took a bunch of photos of the moon. I spend a grand total of about 4 minutes outside before the -8C air got too much for my fingers to control the camera well.
Here are the spoils of war. Just as in the earlier post, these are taken at the 300mm end of my 70-300 zoom, which on my D70 is equivalent to 450mm on 35mm film.
They were all taken at f/5.6, with either 1/640 or 1/800 second exposure.
I should try to use a tripod one day, take a burst of 1/800 exposures, and then try to stack them in software. (I know people use webcams though telescopes and hundreds of exposures to get decent images, so it should work just as well with an SLR.)
As I have mentioned earlier, there was a lunar eclipse. Unfortunately, I was unable to get away from the light poluted skies of New York, and so I spend the 4 hours in the backyard. Here are some highlights...
It was quite cloudy during the first half of the eclipse, so the "darkening" shots look pretty bad.
21:09:39
22:45:02
I got a little bored, so I tried to take a photo of the Orion Nebula. Not quite all that good :) Even the 30 second exposure shows noticable amount of rotation of the Earth.
22:50:49
It was quite difficult to get a good shot of the part of the moon still in the shadow. This was a 1 second exposure, f/5.6. From the noise, I guess it was at least ISO 800...I'm a bit too lazy to check :)
22:52:56
But I tried again....
22:55:52
...and again.
But, if I resize the image to ~50% of the original size, it doesn't look all that bad!
00:09:21
Aaaaand, here's what the moon looked like after the whole thing. Back to normal :) 1/500 second exposure at f/9 with ISO 200.
Few days ago, I decided that it would be fun to try to take a photo of the Internation Space Station (ISS) flying over. I marked my calendar to go outside today for the 18:16-18:22 pass over NYC-area. I used my Nikon D70, with a 18-70mm lens at 18mm (equivalent to 27mm on 35mm format), 15 second exposure, f/13. I used RAW file format. Unfortunately, I didn't get to experiment with the exposure at all.
After I got myself back inside, I used UFRaw (a Gimp plugin) to convert from raw to jpeg for your viewing pleasure. There I used a custom curve which you can get for yourself - but it's probably going to be completely useless.
First, I got some clouds; it was quite windy and the clouds were moving fast enough that in some of the shots they look quite...scary.
And soon after...ISS! The big light source is the moon...
...more ISS...
And the best for last...
The bright star is actually Mars. The reason the moon doesn't look like a circle is because the camera shook a little bit at the beginning of the exposure (take a look at the ISS trail - the beginning is wobbly too).
And here we have the ISS about to disappear behind the trees...
Sweet! Now, if only I could get away from civilization at that time...
More info is on NASA's site.
Today, I was in my room, when my sister pointed out that the rising moon was rather big. I grabbed my camera with a 70-300mm zoom, and snapped this:
Not too bad considering I was at 300mm, f/5.6, and 1/2000 second shutter (aperture priority with spot metering).
Edit: I should add that I took the photo around 5pm, and the fast shutter has made the sky which was rather light seem near black.
So, Pluto isn't a planet anymore!
So, we (Rob and I) drove to the beach right by the university. And stared at the sky for few hours. We saw a number of meteors - I'd categorize them into 3 groups:
- Good - a nice streak
- Great - very nice, long, bright streak
- Awesome - long, bright streak, with a flash of light followed by more streak
I saw many of the "good" ones, about 10-15 of "great" ones, and 1 awesome one. The awesome one was across most of the sky, and toward the end it broke up (giving off that flash of light). Meteor showers are really great.
This weekend, there will be a meteor shower - the Perseid meteor shower. Meteor showers are called after the constallation from which they seem to originate. This "origin" is only an illusion of course. The perseid meteor shower is called after the constallation Perseus. Unfortunately, the moon will be nearly full and that will make the meteors less visible. It, however, should still be fun.
So, go outside on the 12th after sunset and look up and watch the stars fall :)
