Posts Tagged ‘Astrophotography’

A beautiful waxing gibbous moon was out this evening, high in the sky and waiting to be photographed. So I obliged. 😉

It gave me another chance to try out my 50-500mm Sigma “Bigma” lens on my camera when set up on a tripod. I still find that at full extension the focus is bit mushy, and I seem to get the best results between 400-450mm. Still, here is arguably the best shot of the sequence I took, which shows enough detail so that you can see the sunlight hitting the tall peaks of the Montes Jura mountain range on the moon flanking Sinus Iridus (the black basalt plain making up one of the moon’s “eyes”) before it has made it all the way to the bottom of the lunar plain.

Gibbous Moon with Sun Falling on the Peak of Sinus Iridum

A brilliant half-Moon was out under clear skies, so I mounted the Bigma lens on the Olympus E-620, set up my tripod on the back deck and aimed at the sky.

I had more luck using the Bigma lens when it was set between 400-450mm, but I did manage a few shots at 500mm where things were sharp. Here’s the best of the lot:

Half-Moon Shot Using the Bigma Lens

Jupiter and Venus were also out in the early morning sky, relatively low in the eastern skies. None of my shots of Jupiter came out, and all of the ones I shot of Venus ended up being slightly over-exposed or showing signs of chromatic aberration. Still, this one shot shows that there’s some promise:

Crescent Venus

Was stuck for taking a picture of the day until I looked outside from my back deck and saw the moon and Jupiter high in the sky. So I dug out the tripod, tried various settings and this is the one I am happiest with:

Moon and Jupiter in a Cloudy Night Sky

I wouldn’t normally take an astronomical shot on a cloudy night, but I liked the colours that appeared in the cloud just by the bright moon, which I think comes out well in this shot. The bright dot of Jupiter appears lower-left in the shot.

When I stepped out the door early this morning on my way to work, I saw the Moon and Jupiter high overhead. I immediately stepped back inside to grab my camera, fit the telephoto lens onto it as well as the tripod.

Clearly I had missed the closest conjunction point several hours earlier, but I figured this was still worth a shot.

Moon and Jupiter in the Early Morning Sky

(Hmm, Jupiter doesn’t even appear in the thumbnail image above, but it does come through as a multi-pixel circle when seen full-sized. Key thing was keeping the Moon and Jupiter in the same shot. Oh well…)

Given the clear evening skies and the fact that we had a “Supermoon” event (in other words, the moon was full and at the closest point in its orbit to the Earth) I dug out my tripod and took took photos of the moon with my telephoto lens. This is the result:

Supermoon!

I read that there was going to be a near conjunction of the moon with Jupiter, so I dutifully set up my tripod on the back deck to shoot the following picture:

Crescent Moon and Jupiter

While it is hard to tell at thumbnail size, the “bump” that appears at 5 o’clock to Jupiter isn’t a lens echo, but one of that giant planet’s many moons. Am pleased with how this pic came out.

Spent a good chunk of the evening staying up on a crisp (but clear!) night taking pics of the progressing lunar eclipse.

Here’s a sequence of the photos I did that I stitched together in PhotoShop, and later posted to Wikimedia Commons:

Lunar Eclipse Sequence

Postscript: Someone on Wikimedia Commons did a good job of re-arranging my lunar eclipse sequence into a tidy rectangle:

Lunar Eclipse Sequence - December 21, 2010 - Rectangle

I read that the Moon was going to be close to Jupiter this evening, so I set up my tripod, got out the telephoto lens and took a number of shots of which this is the final result.

This is not one shot, but an mix of the best of the shots I took of the Moon and of Jupiter. Jupiter is actually slightly larger to scale (though not by much) so that you can see the relative positions of the moons. And the pic has also been tweaked so that the pixels representing Jupiter and its moons are clear — basically I “knocked out” the representative pixels that appeared, making them completely white. It’s not cheating, it just enhanced! 😉

Still, the resulting shot is effective:

Moon + Jupiter and its Moons (Ganymede, Io, Calisto, Europa)

I first saw this deeply orange moon coming back from work, and when I got home I got out the camera and managed to get a clear picture from the backyard.

Deeply-Orange Moon

Saw the moon appear under clear skies, and I decided to take another try at taking a picture of it — this time trying to see whether I could use my camera along with my little Meade ETX 60 telescope.

After about an hour of fiddling with the telescope’s focus along with my camera on a tripod and playing with many, many exposure settings, the following pic was arguably the best of the bunch I shot.