Tag Archives: Astronomical Photography

Crap Shoot

Posted by dkrashb on

When Pat called to tell me that Mars, Saturn, and Spica were all going to be in the vicinity of the moon the other night, I, of course, had to get out my camera.  It’s a funny thing about astronomical events.  I get all excited because I get a chance to get a picture of white dots in the sky.  I could probably put white dots in a shot of twilight a lot more easily and I wouldn’t have to wait for the actual event to occur.

But, as it turns out, I’m somewhat old fashioned when it comes to photography.  This is rather strange given that I’m a relative new comer to the art.  For whatever reason, I prefer to attempt to capture the real white dots in the sky as opposed to creating my own.

That said, what does one do when one walks away from shooting and, the next day, looks at the images and smacks oneself in the forehead and rolls one’s eyes while wondering what in the heck one was thinking during the previous evening’s shoot?

I had a vague notion that maybe I could take a bunch of exposures and then combine them using Photomatix to create star trails, I guess.  I think I would have needed to shoot for about 3 more hours to create decent star trails.

But there were other problems with my shooting.  First, I couldn’t see Saturn, Spica, or Mars when I looked through the view finder.  As a result, I didn’t shoot as tight as I should have and I ended up with the moon lower in my frame than I would have liked because I guessed wrong as to where they were.

I have to pause here for a moment.  Why is it you can look at the sky and see something plain as day and then look through your viewfinder and have it disappear?  It was even worse trying to use live view mode.  I had to give up on that entirely.  Perhaps if I would have waited longer after twilight the planets and star would have shown up better in the sky.  As it was, I was trying to catch the deep blue of twilight–was there ever a better color of blue?

Having come up with mostly crap, I decided to play with HDR processing a bit more than usual.  I tried combining photos that were not actually shot in a sequence for combining.  I turned off the features that align images and remove ghosts.  I created a scene where we have two moons in one image.  In another, I just ended up with what looked like sun spots reflected in the lens.  It was fun to play with it even though I didn’t really get anything I like out of it.

As an aside, Tisen’s girlfriend, Twiggy, is staying with us again this week.  I caught them napping on the couch together.  They swore they were just napping.  I believe them.

Venus Spotting

Posted by dkrashb on

The Transit of Venus is one of those phenomena you have to get excited about, even though there’s a little voice that says, “it’s a black dot on the sun.”  You must ignore that little voice and get caught in the frenzy surrounding an astronomical event that won’t happen again for 105 years.

For me, the frenzy began when I read an article about it this morning, thanks to a post from a friend who is far better informed than I am.  I thought about trying to find a station on TV that was showing it instead of trying to see it.

Then, the frenzy ended about 10 minutes later when I promptly forgot all about.

After a long day of work, I decided to share Signal Point with my husband as a nice way to relax.  I promised him we wouldn’t hike any further than the 100 yards to the overlook from the parking lot.

I, of course, then packed up my camera, a couple of lenses, and my tripod.  Tisen packed as well.  As soon as he heard the first zipper, he started jamming toys into his mouth.  He managed to get both Tiger and Baby Beaver into his mouth at the same time.

When we arrived at the overlook, a man was already there with a pair of binoculars on a tripod and a camera sitting on the wall.  I was puzzled by his binocular setup–they were positioned about 3 feet above the ground and I couldn’t imagine how he could look through them at that height.  I asked him if he was seeing anything good, assuming he was looking for birds (what else are binoculars for?).

This is when I was reminded of the once-in-a-lifetime (well, twice) event I’d read about only a few hours before.  He used the binoculars to project an image of the sun onto a white card.  That way, we could safely view Venus passing in front of the sun.  Honestly, I was more excited to learn you could view the sun that way than by the black dot in front of the sun.  But it was pretty cool to be able to say we saw it.

I put a neutral density filter that blocks 10 stops of light (that’s a lot of light) and tried to shoot the sun.  However, I was worried about pointing my camera at the sun and, for whatever illogical reason, didn’t want to do so with my 70-200mm lens on it.  I’ve never heard of pointing the sun doing damage to a lens, just the sensor (and the photographer’s eyes), so I don’t know why I was worried about the lens, but shooting with a wide angle zoom only got me to 35mm–not exactly the best focal length for capturing  black dot on the sun.

I did get some interesting sunset shots and, even if we can’t see it, we know Venus is in there somewhere.