These cool nights are nice but not quite clear enough for some deep sky photography. Since I'm limited by gear, I'm very picky about my nights - if it's going to be the one time I go out all winter it better be good! So in the meantime, I have been doing some quick captures. Here I made the most of the alignment of Venus, Mars, and the crescent moon.
The thin clouds and contrails made Venus look larger than normal, and by increasing the f-number I was able to add an interesting lens flare around the moon. It looks like an eerie sun in a dark sky. The same principle works for taking photos of Christmas lights, you can really make them pop by adding tiny lens flares around each one. You just have to increase the exposure time to let in more light, and keep the ISO low to reduce noise.
Single frame Canon T5i ISO 800, 33mm, f/7.1, 6 sec lightened in Photoshop
Here's a closer look with Mars sneaking behind the branches of my favorite river birch trees in the backyard. Venus looks huge in the haze.
Single frame Canon T5i ISO 800, 38mm, f/7.1, 6 sec lightened in Photoshop
Contrails over the moon for a hazy look, pulled back to get a little more foreground. Not much you can do with the foreground composition here in the backyard.
Single frame Canon T5i, ISO 800, 22mm, f/8, 20 sec lightened in Photoshop
Single frame Canon T5i, ISO 800, 22mm, f/9, 20 sec with porch light on
Stack of about 88 frames each at ISO 800, 22mm, f/9, 20 sec
I guess this is one of my only star trail photos with the moon in it. It's kinda neat, I normally exclude it and just focus on the stars. Just for overkill here is a timelapse of the stack:
I was working on digitizing and archiving some old home movies from VHS and I came across this news report my dad must have recorded off the TV. It appears to be a Weather Channel report about the July 11, 1991 total solar eclipse that was visible from Mexico. I love how the voice over mentions the upcoming eclipse in 2017 - that means the future has arrived!
This is also an agonizing reminder that the country is preparing for the eclipse and I've barely started planning. I have the date on my work calendar, but I don't have any concrete idea of where I'll be going or where I'll be staying. I'm leaning toward Missouri right now, but I need to do more research. Luckily, I've found plenty of great resources online such as GreatAmericanEclipse.com. I hear there is a huge gathering at an airport in the western part of the state, that could be a cool experience to see it with a ton of other people at once.
I'm excited, and also trying to plan out what I would realistically want to do to document the occasion. I've read over and over again that if it's your first total solar eclipse, you should not try to photograph it or mess with any equipment, just let yourself go and soak up as much of the experience as you can. I've heard about stars coming out in the day time, the appearance of sunset on every horizon at once, and the collective ecstasy of hundreds of people watching at once. So I might set up a camera with a solar filter to shoot it before totality, but I don't think I'm going to mess around during the extremely precious 2 minute experience.
In 2024 I'll have another chance to photograph a total solar eclipse, and this one is coming to my own backyard! Image by Michael Zeiler, www.GreatAmericanEclipse.com
I also noticed that in 2024 another total solar eclipse is going to be coming to me here in Indiana, and I will literally be able to observe it from my backyard. Assuming good weather, that would be my best chance to try to photograph totality.
April 4, 1997 we got to see Space Shuttle Columbia launch from the top
floor of our hotel in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Reading more about the
mission STS-83 it was actually cut short due to a fuel cell problem.
Pretty neat that we got to see a shuttle launch during our Florida
vacation, it feels like a real piece of history!
I found this video while converting my family's VHS home movie archive into digital files. It's been a huge project, much more time consuming than I originally thought. No wonder companies charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to convert and archive home movies. Sheesh!
I'm on the home stretch! It's been about 50 hours of work so far, I'm counting it as 2 years worth of Xmas presents for my mom. They're all going to be in the cloud for safe keeping, and on an external hard drive spliced into individual clips that are labeled and tagged with dates, people, and places.
It's also inspired me to start taking more video. I take a lot of photos, but I don't take much video of everyday activities and moments. I decided that 2 minute videos are the perfect length to give the future home movie viewer time to assess what is going on and what year it is so the clip doesn't end before they get their bearings.
If there's one thing I want to share after archiving all of these home movies it's this: Once us kids were in middle school, there were fewer and fewer home movies, and the movies that we do have are all of things that seemed important at the time but ultimately aren't - like dozens of jazz band performances and footage of buildings on a European tour. We can just Google facts about Big Ben, but we can't go back in time and capture those little moments of everyday mannerisms, conversations, etc.
My theory is that once us kids got to be teenagers, we didn't want to be in home movies, and band performances were sort of a legitimate excuse to film us kids who probably would have rolled our eyes at a video camera during birthday dinner. My suggestion to everyone out there is to do an annual birthday interview where the birthday person talks about what has been on their mind for that year, what seemed really important, demonstrate a hobby or give a tour of the house, what are the hot topics of that time period, what are their thoughts and interests. This is the kind of stuff that's fascinating to watch back years later.
I modified my DIY homemade solar filter for my DSLR to add a side that will slip snug over my Meade 285 refractor telescope. You can check out my previous post about how I made the initial filter, but it's basically a bunch of poster paper and tape around a $10 square of black polymer.
Double sided solar filter fits on both telescope and DSLR lens
I only have one sheet of this black polymer stuff, so I made a double sided filter that fits on both. Look, it still fits on my DSLR 300mm lens.
Double sided solar filter on DSLR camera 300mm lens
I wasn't even planning on doing this project today, so zero planning went into it. It started when I was cleaning out a closet and found this cardboard mailing tube that had some posters in it. It looked like a good size for a solar filter that goes over the telescope. I tried it out and I was right, this 3 inch cardboard mailing tube was a perfect fit! A little snug but easy to get on and off.
Found out the tube was a perfect size!
Measured where to cut
Cut the cardboard mailing tube with a large kitchen bread knife
Kinda rough but it did the trick!
So next I took the existing filter that I made previously and I taped the tube to the other side. I wrapped another layer of tape around the outside to hold the other tape in place, and then guess what, I taped it some more.
The end result is this totally low budget totally makeshift solar filter. Fabulous! It still only cost me about $10 to make, and all of the real cost is tied up in the little sheet of black polymer.
I don't have many prime focus attempts under my belt - in fact if you search for "prime focus" on this blog, you'll only come up with 3 posts of the moon at prime focus, and a couple Jupiter, and a couple double stars. In fact, I don't believe I've even attempted the moon at prime focus since I upgraded from the Canon Rebel XT to the Canon T5i. After some major issues a while back, at least now I have my go-to prime focus attachments using a T-ring --> T-thread to .965" --> .965" threaded collar setup.
As I've noted before, the hardest part of photographing the moon at prime focus with my Meade 285 refractor is the clunky focusing wheel on the telescope. The focuser is plastic, and there is no fine focus adjustment. So, as you can imagine, when looking at the LCD screen on the back of the camera and adjusting the focus, it's nearly impossible to tell when I'm actually in focus... Whenever I touch the telescope the image jumps all over.
With all that in mind, the advantages to prime focus are that you get a much larger image (and therefore higher number of pixels in the diameter of the moon) compared to just a 300mm camera lens. Prime focus definitely has the potential upper hand, but a major handicap when it comes to focusing - whereas the camera lens has incredible hands-free focus, but the moon is only projected onto a tiny area in the center of the image sensor and thus a smaller diameter in real pixels.
I took the images below on Sunday, September 11, 2016.
Click to enlarge, prime focus vs 300mm camera lens
Now many it's not completely fair, the 300mm moon on the right is far from my best attempt. I only stacked 10 frames in Registax, which was having a rough go of it on Windows 10. When I finally got it to stack without crashing, I noticed the alignment wasn't quite right, but it still does a nice job showing the huge difference (3x the diameter) in relative size.
Stack of 10 frames, Canon T5i at 300mm, ISO 100, f/9, 1/160 sec with High Pass layer in Photoshop
Stack of 17 frames, Canon T5i prime on Meade 285, ISO 400, 1/250 sec, 900mm with High Pass layer in Photoshop and Exposure +1.0 in Adobe Camera RAW
From my perspective on the patio
During my observing session, I also saw the rings of Saturn through the Meade 285, which is always a treat - even though it is insanely frustrating to try to position this old mount that doesn't want to stay put once you have your target. I also tried several times to get my iPhone mounted on the eyepiece to take a video of Saturn, but the mount is just too finicky and shifty.
Finally, I took this quick timelapse video of my prime setup using the app Hyperlapse, which is convenient when you don't know how much you will want to end up speeding up the final video. Unlike the other timelapse apps where you have to set the speed at the beginning.
After a quick single frame of comet Catalina C/2013 US10 with my Canon T5i DSLR a couple weeks ago, I was hoping for clear skies to do a more thorough treatment. I woke up at 5:00am on January 2, 2016 and took my motor driven Orion EQ-1 mount out to the back patio. It was cold but not bone-chilling cold like some mornings, and we've had a mild winter so far this year.
I did a rushed setup and got some pretty poor alignment, meaning I could only take up to 6 second exposures without star trails. I was feeling lazy so I figured 6 seconds was good enough and I didn't want to re-align everything. I was also battling the pre-dawn twilight, which would ruin my session in a couple hours.
This YouTube video shows a timelapse of my setup, getting the Canon T5i on the Orion EQ mount. The Orion EQ-1 mount has an optional motorized attachment that will turn the camera/telescope to compensate for the rotation of the Earth. The motor does not track or lock on to anything, it just tries to turn at a constant rate. While this might be good for keeping your target in the field of view longer, it's not very smooth or precise. It's much better than a fixed tripod, however.
Notice the amount of drift in the timelapse video at the end. My alignment was not great, but that should result in a constant drift in a single direction - not the shaking up and down motion we see. It looks like small variations in the motor speed are causing the mount to lag or speed up.
The sequence at the end is 239 frames, each 6 second exposures at ISO 3200, f/5.6, 300mm with Canon T5i on January 2, 2016. If you look closely you can see the small fuzzy comet move slowly to the left relative to the star below it.
Comet photos with DSLR are tricky, especially with a very basic mount like this or even on a fixed tripod. Sometimes I get good results with stacking, and sometimes I like single frames better. I was really hoping to get some of this comet's tail, like I did with comet Lovejoy last year, but 6 seconds was just not enough.
While taking over 230 individual photos, each at 6 seconds long, the comet moved a noticeable amount. This thing is moving quick! It becomes more obvious when you look at the first and last frame I took that morning. Here is an animated GIF showing the earliest and latest frame from my stack to show the change in position.
Animation of 2 single frames taken with Canon T5i each at 6 sec, ISO 3200, f/5.6, 300mm
Single frame from the GIF animation above in large .png format to show detail
This was also my first time stacking a comet photo in Deep Sky Stacker with comet mode, attempting to register the position of the comet to hold it constant and let the stars trail in the background. Because the comet moved quite a few pixels across the field of view relative to the background stars, I was hoping this painstaking process would pay off with a nice comet tail.
In Deep Sky Stacker, you literally have to go in and click on the comet in every single light frame to teach the program where the comet is. This maybe isn't so bad if you have 6x 5 minutes exposures or something, but I had over 200x 6 second exposures. Ugh! I gave it the ol' college try to see what it would do, and I was underwhelmed. After about 2 hours of pin-pointing the comet in sub frames and another 2 hours of stacking, the image below is what I got out of it.
Stack of 213 light frames, 38 dark, 25 bias, ISO 3200, f/5.6, 300mm, 6 sec (no flat frames)
You can see comet Catalina to the left and bright Arcturus to the right. All of the stars are trailing and the comet is supposed to appear stationary in this kind of stacking. I forgot flat frames and I have a massive gradient hot spot in the middle of the image. I'm going to try re-stacking with my ISO 1600 flat frames and see if they're close enough to do the job. I've been using the same flats for just about every stacked photo, I'm so bad!
Tagging the comet frame by frame in Deep Sky Stacker
Here is another process with flat frames - do I see a hint of a blobby tail coming off to the right or is that my imagination? Honestly, I like the look of the single frames better. The stars are around and the comet has color. I just should have spent more time on the set up and gotten longer exposures!!
Same process as above but with flat frames to remove the hot spot in the middle
It's always fun to take a stack of photos for star trails, and with comet mode in StarStaX there are a lot more things you can do with these files than simply make a stack. I might even go back and use some stacks I took before to turn them into comet trail animation videos like the one below. It's very easy, you just click a box to save each iteration of the process and then dump those files into video software to use them as movie frames.
Here are the results of 243 individual frames in the backyard.
Stack of 243 individual frames taken with Canon T5i, each at ISO 800, 18mm, f/4, 15 sec
I didn't bother removing any of the airplanes or satellites, and didn't do any color correction. Usually it's nice to tint it a little toward the blue side, increase contrast a bit, and remove all of the airplane light trails before stacking. But I'm not going to get a print of this so it's fine for now.
What I really wanted to show you was the resulting video using comet trails in StarStaX. It slowly fades out the frames after they appear, meaning the airplane trails don't stick around as long. Also the light pollution from the houses go off like flashes instead of sticking around.
On a side note, there aren't a lot of good ways to show vertical videos online. Definitely not on YouTube, so I am trying to embed this Instagram file. It's lower resolution, but it's preferable to having two huge black bars on the side of the video. Not a bad solution for a quick post!
I saw the slim crescent moon last night as Chris and I were walking out of O'Charley's (which is a totally great and totally under-rated restaurant by the way). I looked it up on PhotoPills to see what percent illuminated it was, and it was about 5% - so now my slimmest but still worthwhile for a photo.
I made a timelapse of the moon setting behind the roof of my neighbor's house, and also pulled some individual frames out. There was some great earthshine on the dark side of the moon, and I'm glad the chimney across the way provided a little bit of foreground interest.
Single frame Canon T5i, f/9, 1 sec, ISO 1600, 205mm
Single frame Canon T5i, f/10, 1.3 sec, ISO 3200, 300mm
Single frame Canon T5i, f/9, 1.3 sec, ISO 1600, 300mm
After two successful Geminid captures (particularly last year) I guess the weather wasn't in my favor this year. I made an attempt at photographing the Geminids meteor shower on December 11, 2014 at 9:11pm. It was a completely clear evening and sunset, and started with a clear sky - but I think the warm air during the day led to a blanket of clouds after sunset even though the forecast actually looked very promising!
As with any failed meteor attempt, you always walk away with some consolation prizes in the form of star trails or even a couple neat sky pics. Here's what I managed - no meteors but a nice view of my favorite constellation Perseus over my neighbor's unfinished house:
Canon T5i single frame f/4, 18mm, 15 sec, ISO 800
Canon T5i single frame f/4, 18mm, 15 sec, ISO 800 about 20 minutes later...
92 images stacked in StarStaX
Photos above adjusted in the app Snapseed using the 'Automatic' filter, it does some quick work!
I made the images into a timelapse video: 152 individual frames taken with Canon T5i, each at f/4, 18mm, ISO 800, 15 sec; Timelapse in Sony Vegas with 0.07s still image duration each.
Final product, 5 second iPhone MOV converted to AVI and stacked in Registax
I used my homemade iPhone telescope adapter mount to hold my phone over the eyepiece (digiscoping). I used a 9mm eyepiece on a vintage Meade 285 (60mm, 900mm, f/15). I took the video on March 6, 2014 at 10:32pm ET.
Next, I converted the iPhone MOV file to AVI to work with it in Registax. I also have a blog post outlining that process using the conversion software Streamclip MPEG.
Once it's an AVI file, you can "stack" the video in Registax similar to a stack of still photos.
Here is a short video I put together with slides of my mount construction, the raw MOV file (very shaky because I was actually holding it in the right position over the eyepiece), and the final product. It's amazing how Registax is able to pick out the best bits and align them even with a shaky video like this!
Obviously the moon photo needed to be flipped horizontally to compensate for the angled mirror in the neck of the telescope just before the eyepiece. Hmmm, I bet this has a technical name. [Looking it up] It does! A star diagonal - how pretty.
My west-facing balcony is really paying off! I can easily check the sky conditions at any time. I saw this bright burning sky while I was on the phone with my mom and I said "I gotta go, there is a really cool sunset and it can't wait."
Not only can I not multi-task, but I had to use my phone to record a timelapse video (bottom).
The TimeLapse app () on my phone now has smart exposure, so you can see it constantly trying to keep up with the changing light.
I took these videos using a time lapse app on my iPhone 5 shooting in 1080p. I forget the exact settings, but they're around 40-50 times regular speed.
I'm getting pretty sick of these clouds. They swoop in from Lake Michigan to the NW, and always get worse in the evening for some reason.
It's 41º F out right now in Bowling Green, OH. What gives!? I was freezing sitting out by the Rec Center pond for 45 minutes recording a time lapse of the sunset and crescent moon. Here are some photos of my evening...
I set my iPhone up on a tripod to record a time lapse of the sunset and crescent moon
Typical Moon-Jupiter conjunction photo
140mm, 1/125 sec, f/5.0, ISO 400
The crescent moon and Jupiter a little closer to the horizon
39mm, 0.5 sec, f/5.0, ISO 100
I like how the water looks in this one!
18mm, 1.6 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100
A nice shot of the Moon-Jupiter conjunction over the pond
30mm, 1.6 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100
I put some pine cones in water to watch them close up. It took about 2 hours.
I had to put my tripod in the sink to get a low angle shot. I used the Glif tripod adapter.
I put the iPhone in airplane mode so it wouldn't vibrate.
I put the pine cones under a warm light to try to get them to open. They barely budged after 4 hours. I tried another 4.5 hour time lapse the next morning (about 12 hours after being out of the water).
It's a lot easier to get them to close. Getting them to open up again takes a long time.
3.5 hours sped up 50x shows a mob of students gathering on the dance floor at BGSU's Opening Weekend event Late Night @ the Rec on August 17, 2012. Filmed on iPhone using Time Lapse app ().
These two images were my longest star trail stacks to date, the first with 107 and the second with 109 stacked images (15 sec exposure each). My plan was to tape the shutter down and let the battery die, but I came out to find my first exposure had stopped because the tape lost its grip after an hour and a half or so.
My second image began at around 2:00am and went until the battery died. I taped the shutter down while the camera was on a table instead of pressing down on the camera while mounted on the tripod, this let me press down with more force to secure the shutter with my mechanical pencil eraser.
Possible Iridium flare cut off by my camera between exposures
Here is a close-up of an object in the first photo that does not appear to be a plane like the rest of the lights. My guess would be that this is a satellite coming into view that is cut off by the 15 sec exposure. This seems to fit the description of an Iridium flare coming into view and fading out again without traveling very far across the sky. The Iridium flare on Wikipedia shows a 30 second exposure that matches the beginning and end of my flare, which was cut in half by the camera's processing time.
I don't usually let to take photos until the battery dies, because I'm nervous about leaving my camera out in front of my apartment complex. That's why it was such a treat to visit my brother at his house in Fishers, because I could let my camera go and go!
Here's a picture of my brother learning how to do star trail photography with his Nikon D3000. His trails didn't turn out as good as mine, but he's just beginning!
Brian getting into astrophotography for the first time
He was so excited, we even got up on the roof to check out the view - deciding later that the roof was too steep for a tripod observatory.
Rooftop view of Fishers, IN taken with iPhone at 9:53pm
Finally, here is a video showing the creation of the star trails. I saved each composite image in StarStaX so the trails appear to grow over time.
