Star Trails over Georgia Strait, Vancouver Island

On a recent trip to Vancouver Island, staying on the coast of the Georgia Strait in Union Bay, we had a few days of crystal clear weather. On one of those nights I decided to try taking a star trail shot. Rather than taking one long exposure (as with film), my plan was to shoot multiple short exposures and merge them in post processing. Although the sky over the Georgia Strait is relatively dark (Bortle Scale 3), the Moon was nearly full so I followed the techniques outlined in this article about shooting star trails in light polluted skies. 

I set up my Nikon D750 and Irix 15mm lens in the backyard of our Airbnb, did some test shots, started the camera intervalometer and went to bed. About 6:30 in the morning, the sunlight streaming into the bedroom woke me and I decided to bring the camera inside before going back to bed. I was a little surprised the camera was still shooting as I'd started it before midnight and had assumed the battery would have died after 4 or 5 hours. 

When I took a look at the images captured that night, naturally the ones towards the end were all over-exposed; sunrise had been at 5:12AM. However, I also noticed that the sky never really got fully dark in any of the images. Consulting PhotoPills, it turns out that astronomical twilight that evening was from 11:18PM through 12:01AM and astronomical twilight the next morning was from 11:59PM the previous evening through 3:25AM. In other words, there was never a time when it was truly night (the time between twilights). Being located at almost 50 degrees north latitude and as it was a day before the summer solstice, summer nights there are really short!

This image is my first pass at post-processing and only covers about an hour and 45 minutes. Even still, it took about 4 hours of work to go through the images removing light trails from airplanes and satellites. I have more images to process, at least through 3:25AM (the start of nautical twilight) but besides having a higher number of airplane and satellite trails to edit out, those images also have a lot of ferry traffic on the strait, leaving long bright streaks of light along the waterline. I'll eventually work on those but for now I'm satisfied with what I have done so far. 

As you can see, shooting directly out over the strait involved having the camera aimed just a little east of due north. The small arc in the center of all the other concentric arcs is the star Polaris, the North Star.  The brighter star trails around it are from stars in constellations like Cassiopeia, Cepheus, Perseus and Cygnus. If you look closely, you'll see some color variations; not all the stars are white. 

One light streak I left in that isn't a star trail is on the far right. Blogger doesn't provide a way for you to zoom in but if you could you'd see a small meteor, a shooting star. 

Enjoy! Be sure to click on the image to see enlarged. 

Update: I've replaced the original image with a revised edit in which I blended a single foreground image for a more natural appearance. 

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Fine Detail in Corona

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, assuming that to really get sharp detailed images of totality I needed to go through the rather involved process of using calibration frames to process all of the images I planned to stack before trying to stack, register and merge them. After spending a few evenings starting down that road, I took a break and in reviewing tutorials on processing solar eclipse images I ran across several that describe doing everything directly in Photoshop without the use of registration frames. 

Following the process described in this Sky & Telescope article, I created the image above using a set of images shot at 2 stop intervals from 1/4000th of a second to 1 second, all shot at f/5 and ISO 100 with my Nikon D750 through our Sky Watcher Evostar 72ED telescope. 

Click on it to enlarge and check out the incredible detail. You'll find features like:

• Plenty of detail in the solar corona
• Solar prominences
• The lunar surface illuminated with light reflected from Earth (Earthshine)
• Several stars from the constellation Pisces

This is just the first phase of edits described in the article so more to come. In the meantime, I did a separate version with features labeled. 

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Timelapse of Totality over Ellis County, Texas

UPDATE: Now that I've had time to work on some of my other images and videos, I went back and remixed this one to fix some things I rushed the first time around. In this edit the sky appears darker, closer to what we saw that day, so the coronal ring around the Sun stands out better. 

Another total solar eclipse imaging projects I planned to do is a timelapse sequence of the eclipse. In 2017 I tried shooting the entire eclipse but this time I just focused on the 5 minutes before totality, the 4+ minutes of totality and the 5 minutes after. Unlike 2017, we had much clearer skies and this came out pretty much just as I planned. Thanks to Alan Dyer (amazingsky.net) for the tips in his book on shooting the eclipse, specifically the tips on shooting a wide-angle timelapse!

To capture this, I set up my son Brian's Nikon D750 with our Irix 15mm f/2.4 wide-angle lens on a tripod at the corner of my son Chris' yard where we were observing the eclipse. My D750 was in use on the telescope so a big thanks to Brian for the use of his camera!

The sequence was shot with the internal intervalometer set to capture an image every second for 15 minutes with the timer set to start it at 1:35pm so that I didn't have to remember to start it on time. I set exposure ramping on so the camera would automatically adjust the exposure as the sky got darker and brighter, then set the exposure compensation to +1.33 so that it wouldn't be heavily overexposed during the pre- and post-totality shots. 

Once at home, I processed the 900 images in LRTimeLapse and Lightroom Classic to create a video clip from the images and then added titles, adjusted track speed and added music in DaVinci Resolve. This is the finished product! 

A few things to watch for in the video:

• At about the 18 second mark, look for the small star to lower right of the Sun. That's not a star, it is the planet Venus!
• The contrail at lower center is probably a commercial aircraft, possibly one of the one flying along the eclipse path to prolong how long they could watch totality. 
• At about the 36 second mark, the "insect" flittering about above us in the drone landing after shooting the arrival and departure of the lunar umbra. 

Enjoy!

ISS Lunar Transit Mesquite Texas: Composite Image

As I shared in my last post, I was up in the very early hours this morning to catch a unique event, the International Space Station (ISS) passing in front of the Moon, a lunar transit. What I didn't share in that post is why I used the video mode on my Nikon D750 instead of taking individual photos. 

The D750 is a great camera with some powerful capabilities. It has a top capture speed of 6.5 frames per second. Unfortunately, it can't sustain that speed for long. After about a dozen shots, the buffer fills up and the camera slows to closer to 1 frame per second or even 1 every two seconds. With an event that only lasts about 6 tenths of a second, since the camera only shoots at 6.5 frames per second for about 2 seconds, it would take perfect timing to be able to capture any part of the transit. If I started shooting 4 or 5 seconds too soon or too late, I might miss it all together. 

However, with a video mode of 60 frames per second, I just had to start recording well before the start of the transit and then let it run long enough to be sure the transit was over before stopping the camera. Thankfully, when I was scrambling to finish focusing this morning and realized it was almost time for the transit, starting the video and letting it record for a few minutes was enough to capture the transit and capture far more frames with the ISS than I could have even if the D750 could capture images at 6.5 frames per second indefinitely. Using video has its drawbacks, e.g., things in motion (and the ISS moves incredibly fast) inherently have a little blur, even with a really fast shutter speed, but capturing more images with the ISS in them and having a bit more flexibility in starting/stopping the capture was worth it. Perhaps someday I'll get another chance to do this and will try capturing it with images instead of video. 

To create the image above, I went through the video with Lightroom, selecting each frame with the ISS and exporting it as a JPEG file. I then took these files and opened them in Photoshop as levels. By using auto-align and auto-blend, Photoshop produced a single composite image showing the track the ISS took across the Moon. I decided that the first draft was a bit busy so I did it over again just using every other ISS frame to produce this photo. I also applied some intelligent sharpening to make up for the camera being a little out of focus. It's not great but I am satisfied with it. 

Click on the image to see enlarged. Enjoy!

 

ISS Lunar Transit Mesquite Texas

I have captured images of the International Space Station (ISS) passing overhead before but I've never captured an ISS transit. Until now!

Every few weeks I check transit-finder.com to see whether there are solar or lunar transits happening nearby. Earlier this week I found that there would be one early AM this morning. 

Lots of things have to come together just right to see the ISS cross in front of the Sun or the Moon. 

• A location on the Earth where the ISS passes directly in between that location and the Sun or Moon.
• The ISS has to be close enough to the Earth for its angular size (how big it appears in the sky) to stand out. My sources indicate it's best when the ISS has an angular size of at least 42 arc seconds. 
• A time of day or night when there will be enough contrast for the ISS to stand out against the given object. For the Sun, this is pretty straightforward but a transit in front of the Moon when it's up during daylight makes for a more challenging capture. 
• And, of course, you have to be able to see the event so that means little or no clouds. 

The last few times there's been one in the area, the weather didn't cooperate but this time it was pretty clear. The location was within 15 minutes of home and the ISS was forecast to have an angular size of 59.72 arc seconds. 

A little before midnight, I packed up my equipment and Luna in the car and headed to the area where Linda, Lexie and I used to take walks when we lived in Mesquite. With a tripod, mount, telescope, camera and other gear, I needed a spot where I could set up next to the car so I had to scout a few spots looking for a place without too much bright light, on public property, and with a clear view of Polaris (to align the mount) and the Moon. I finally settled on the parking lot at the Palos Verdes Lake Park. Unfortunately, that chewed up enough time that I was still trying to get a sharp focus on the Moon when I realized it was time for the transit. I went ahead and started video rolling, let it go for a few minutes and then packed things up and headed home. 

Today, sitting down with the video I was thrilled to find I had captured it! The focus is not great but it is clear enough to be able to see the ISS moving across the face of the Moon. The entire event was just over a half a second so shooting at 60 fps I caught about 30 frames of the ISS. 

I'm sharing the video for now. Later, I'll work on putting together a photo that captures the entire event in one image.

Be sure to watch full-screen for the best view of the transit. 

In the meantime, here are the technical details:

SkyWatcher Evostar 72ED

0.85 Focal Reducer/Flattener

2X Teleconverter

Nikon D750 (DX mode)

Deep Sky Dad AF3 focusing motor

60fps video at ISO 3200 1/4000th second shutter speed

SkyWatcher Star Adventurer GTi mount

Radian Carbon Fiber tripod

Edited in DaVinci Resolve 

Event details:

See transit-finder.com screenshot below. The centerline crossed the trail just north of Northwest Drive. I captured this video from the park parking lot (not shown in this diagram but it's at the northwest tip of the lake).

October 14th, 2023 Annular Eclipse Timelapse

 

Unable to make it to a spot on the path of the annular eclipse today to view the Ring of Fire, I captured this timelapse of the partial eclipse view from my backyard. 

What's great about successfully capturing this eclipse that I wasn't even home! Since our granddaughter Harper was showing her rabbit at the State Fair of Texas stock show today, I had the equipment set up to run automatically. Months of preparation and practice paid off! BTW, more to come on the State Fair....

The shadows on the first few seconds are power lines which appear to move across the face of the Sun but it's the Sun's apparent motion across the sky, tracked by the telescope/camera, that accounts for the motion. 

This view was captured with a special solar filter, a Baader solar film filter. Without it, pointing my telescope and camera at the Sun would have damaged my equipment. 

As we are approaching "solar maximum", the Sun is pretty active so there are plenty of Sunspots across the face of the Sun right now. 

Here's what I used to create this timelapse. I set the internal intervalometer on the D750 to take shots every 30 seconds at 1/1000th shutter speed from just before till just after the eclipse, about 380 shots in all. Just to be sure I didn't have to worry about batteries in the camera and tracker lasting long enough, I ran everything off an external power pack stored under the tripod. You can see the equipment in action in my post on eclipse preparations. 

Equipment

Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED Refractor

Sky Watcher 0.85 Flattener/Reducer

Sigma 2X Teleconverter

DeepSkyDad AF3 Autofocuser

Baader Solar Film Filter

Nikon D750 DSLR

Sky Watcher Star Adventurer 2 Tracker

Radian Carbon Fiber Tripod

Processed on Mac OS with 

Adobe Lightroom Classic

LRTimelapse

DaVinci Resolve

Music

"Eclipse"

by 1st Contact

Shared under Creative Commons License

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/1st-contact/single/eclipse/

Solar Transit of a Jet

UPDATE: I've replaced the previous video with a new version that includes the sound of the jet flyover from the original audio track. 

While out filming the sun to practice for the total solar eclipse next April, I was photo-bombed by a jet! 

The technical term is "transit", when an object crosses in front of an astronomical body. There is plenty of air traffic over our house with Love Field and DFW serving the area so I guess this shouldn't have surprised me but observing a transit (like this one, or this one) takes being in just the right place at just the right time so it's a pretty rare thing to have happen. 

One reason I happened to be shooting at this time is that I'm working out exactly what equipment I'm going to be shooting with for the total solar eclipse. This video was shot using:

• Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED refractor
• Baader film solar filter
• 2" mirror diagonal
• Celestron 1.25" 2X Barlow
• T2-ring
• Nikon D750 DSLR
• Focusing with DeepSkyDad AF3 autofocuser
• Sky Watcher Star Adventurer 2 tracker
• Radian carbon fiber tripod

I have a new 2" 2X Barlow and I plan to shoot straight-through (i.e., no diagonal) but I am still working out what combination of components will allow me to properly focus with the new Barlow. Once I have that worked out, I'll start working on automating my astrophotography workflow using a small computer (a Raspberry 4 running software called StellerMate).  

The quality of this video isn't great but that's basically because I was focusing (pun intended) more on getting the equipment working right than on the finer details. Next April may see a long ways off but it will be here in the blink of an eye and as I know from my experience in 2017, being ready to catch a full eclipse end-to-end, most importantly those few minutes of totality, takes an incredible amount of practice. So, I'll be shooting pretty regularly over the next few months to make sure I have everything working perfectly. 

Anyone have a way to ensure that April clouds don't spoil the eclipse for me, er, us?

Seriously, you'll notice from the video that the Sun is pretty active with quite a few sunspots showing. Over the next few weeks, if I can get a day with good "seeing" (i.e., where there is minimal air turbulence), I'll get some shots with lots of detail, everything in focus, and the sunspots should jump off the page at you. Stay tuned!

Warning 

NEVER look directly at the sun without proper protection. This video was shot using a telescope and camera equipped with a special solar filter.

Blue Moon Rising Over White Rock Lake

UPDATE [August 20, 2024]:
If you have followed the news you know there was a Blue Super Moon yesterday. However, it was different from the one I wrote about below. The one last year was a monthly Blue Moon, while the one yesterday was a seasonal Blue Moon. A monthly Blue Moon is the second full moon in a calendar month, whereas a seasonal Blue Moon is the third full moon in an astronomical season with four full moons, occurring between an equinox and a solstice. Why is the 3rd instead of the 4th full Moon in a season the Blue Moon instead of the 4th? Good question! If you know why, share it in a comment.

As for being a Super Moon, that label applies to both the full Moon yesterday and the one for last August although last August the Moon was slightly closer to Earth (about 2,700 miles closer).

With the extreme Texas heat, lately I've been waiting till after sunset to take our Weimaraner, Luna, for a walk and we've been walking along the shore of White Rock Lake near where we live since it's often cooler with a little breeze coming off the water. 

I had not planned to shoot the Blue Moon tonight, but after my wife Linda asked if I would be, it occurred to me that it would be visible over the eastern shore of the lake when Luna and I were out walking. I decided to see if I could get a shot of the full Moon rising over the sailboats at Corinthian Sailing Club before our walk. I grabbed my small refractor (Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED), my Nikon D750 and a tripod, loaded Luna in the car and headed to the lake. 

Apparently, so did everyone else. I guess the news of the Blue Super Moon got enough press that lots of other people showed up at the lake to watch it rise and traffic driving up the west shore was like rush hour. By the time I was parking the Moon was already well above the tree line. I hastily set up the scope and camera, got a reasonably good focus on the Moon and started shooting. All the while, Luna hung out with me, thankfully only wrapping her lead around the tripod as I was finishing up. 

Ironically, the shot below was the first shot I took. Of all the others, I could perhaps merge a few bracketed shots for something with a higher dynamic range but frankly this is pretty much the shot I had in mind when I left the house. 

Enjoy!

As always, click on the image to see full-screen. 

2023 Perseids and Mesquite Tree

In the wee hours of this morning, my mother Doris' birthday, I drove out east of Dallas looking for dark(er) skies to view and capture the 2023 Perseid meteor shower. The first spot I had planned to try turned out to have more brightness in the sky than I hoped for so I went a little farther out and found a quiet spot on a country road in College Mound just southeast of Terrell. Parking well off the road in front of a pasture gate, I set up two cameras shooting east across the pasture with a mesquite tree in the foreground. I'm still going through all the images and may eventually post a composite similar to the one I did in 2016 but this image has the best and brightest of the ones I captured. 

This was taken with a Nikon D750 using an Irix Firefly 15mm f/2.4 wide angle lens. It's a 20 second exposure taken at f/2.8 and IS) 6400. I processed it in Lightroom to adjust brightness, contrast and color temperature. 

Not an ideal composition given the streaking speck of comet dust is right at the edge of the frame and cut off midflight but it's still a beauty. And it's not alone. Besides the Pleiades and Jupiter, look close and you'll find at least one other Perseid and at least one satellite. Even with the comparatively dark Bortle 4.5 class skies, there are still light domes on the horizon from towns further east like Wills Point to the left. The yellowish glow towards the center is from the rising crescent moon not yet visible above the treeline.

I'll share more once I have time to go through the rest of the images from both cameras. In the meantime, enjoy!

Click the image to enlarge. 

Olivia and Papa Chase the ISS and More

Last month, my granddaughter Harper and I went out to capture an image of the International Space Station (ISS) flying over Dallas. As described in my post about that effort, we were only partially successful, foiled by clouds. This past Tuesday evening, granddaughter Olivia and I headed up to the north shore of White Rock Lake to try again. In spite of being a little late getting to the lake and rushing to set up cameras, we managed to catch the last 90 seconds or so of the ISS flyover as it traveled from the northwest, overhead and down to the southeast. Here is the result.

This is a composite image created by stacking 9 images taken with a Nikon D750 and a Rokinon 14mm wide angle lens mounted on a tripod. Each shot was 8 seconds long with 2 seconds between each shot. What Olivia and I saw was an incredibly bright "star" moving across the sky, too steady and too fast to be an airplane. It appears as a streak in this image due to the long exposure of each original image; the gaps are due to the delay between each shot while the camera saved the image files. 

This photo demonstrates an interesting aspect of ISS flyovers. We can see the ISS fly by only at certain times and places, its visibility due to the viewer being in a position to see sunlight reflected off of the ISS. For this flyover, as it was traveling "away" from the sun (which had set just over an hour earlier) its orbit carried it into the Earth's shadow. Notice how the lowest trail fades off and disappears. 

Another interesting object in the sky that night was the Sturgeon Moon, the first of two "supermoons" this month. It was cloaked in clouds until just as we were getting in the car to head home so it just appears in this image as a bright glow to the lower left. Note all the people on the dock though; there was quite a crowd out that night with people all up and down the shoreline to watch the full moon rising. I wonder how many of them also realized they were getting a chance to see the ISS, too.

We also tried to capture a flyover of a satellite, BlueWalker 3, which passed over this same view looking south across the lake about a half-hour before the ISS flyover. Unfortunately, even having two cameras shooting during its flyover, we didn't capture it. I'm not sure whether it was due to its lower elevation, the haze to the south east or a miscalculation on my part about where and when we would see it. That'll be a target to try for another night. 

Thanks to the long exposures taken, the composite includes more than just the ISS and the Moon. Stars of the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer) and Scorpio (the Scorpion) are visible including Antares, the red super-giant star that is known as the Heart of the Scorpion. Here is a labeled version of the image above. 

The images above were edited to remove all the other stuff we saw in the sky that night: aircraft. The following is a composite of 12 images stacked "as is" in Photoshop. It shows not only the ISS but all the aircraft trails captured. Having simply stacked the images, stars appear as streaks and headlights and taillights of cars on the far shore of the lake appear as streaks. 

One final image, this time an edited stack of all the images, showing not only the ISS but all the aircraft trails captured. Unlike the unedited stack, in this view the sky (Moon and stars), lake and even the car headlights on the far shore are all from a single image. The aircraft and ISS trails from the other 11 images were masked to overlay that single image.

As always, click on an image to see large. 

Jack and Papa Capturing Moon and Planets

While our grandson Jack stayed with us last week, he and I went out one evening to take our Weimaraner, Luna, for a walk on the east shore of White Rock Lake and to try capturing the 3-day old crescent Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury over the iconic Pump Station. 

We were partially successful. Jack got in a dozen or so shots with my Nikon D750, starting with some test shots and then bracketing to try and get both the properly exposed lunar crescent and also the rest of the lunar surface lit with Earthshine. As explained below we didn't quite get what we wanted. Had the mosquitoes not chased us off, we might have eventually got it but Luna was getting impatient anyway so we put the camera away and went for our walk. 

Unfortunately, the brackets didn't get us quite enough dynamic range to get both Earthshine and a lunar crescent that showed any detail. In the end, a single shot had the best overall exposure and detail that we were after. Although the lunar crescent is heavily over-exposed, the Earthshine-lit surface is still visible. And although Mercury is lost in the haze over Dallas, in addition to dim Mars and bright Venus you can just make out the stars of the "front-end" of the constellation Leo the Lion with it's brightest star, Regulus. 

Here is the final shot and below is a version that is labeled. Enjoy!

Photo by Jackson Eaton

Photo by Jackson Eaton

As always, click on image to view full-screen.

Bedroom Camera Obscura Timelapse

Building on the project described in my last post which involved creating a camera obscura out of a bedroom with our grandkids Olivia and Jack, we have taken the project to the next level: video!

For this, we used Olivia's pinhole lens which with its larger aperture allowed shooting shorter exposures. That let us maximize how many frames we could capture in a given amount of time. I re-framed the view in my Nikon D750 to take advantage of the wall space on the right and we then set it up to take one ten-second shot every 12 seconds. At the end of an hour and 10 minutes, I stopped the camera, having taken 348 images. 

The next step was loading the images on the computer, cropping to a 16:9 ratio and adjusting the exposure a little in Lightroom plus inverting them vertically, then using LRTimelapse to render a 4K video. The last step was adding titles and music (Pounded Piano by Podington Bear) in Da Vinci Resolve. 

This was shot at a busy time in the backyard, with our Weimaraner Luna coming and going and with the grass being  mowed. The timelapse also captures clouds floating by and the shadows of trees and such moving. 

This is short but pretty cool... Enjoy! 

Best viewed full-screen. 

Olivia, Jack and Papa Build a Camera Obscura Out of a Bedroom!

Last week, our granddaughter Harper stayed with us (see previous post). This week, it is her brother Jack and cousin Olivia. They are also attending Dallas Parks & Recreation Outdoor Adventure Camp during the day and in the evening we're having other adventures with them. While Harper's camp was focused on photography, this week the focus at camp is on archery. Linda and I don't have a lot of archery experience so our evening adventures are things that are more in our wheelhouse. One of those is photography. :-)

Optics: the principle of the camera obscura.
Engraving, 1752. Wellcome Collection

Tuesday evening, the project was to build a camera obscura. If you aren't familiar with the term, it's an ancient discovery that by having a darkened room with a small hole in a wall or window, a view of the outside scene is projected onto the opposite wall. The image is inverted (sky below, ground above) and in practice is pretty dim. In this digital age, as an alternative to sitting for a long period for your eyes to become dark-adapted enough to see the image, you can capture it with a camera capable of taking long-exposure photographs. 

 There are various tutorials available online on how to create a camera obscura out of a room in your house and capture the image on a camera. We used this one from the George Eastman Museum. It's very clear and easy to follow.  

Outside view of Camera Obscura

In choosing a room to use, we went with the master bedroom. Not only does it have a window with a reasonably interesting view (our backyard) but there is just that one window and although the room has glass doors facing our patio, there is a storm shutter that (mostly) blocks all the light from it.

While the kids were at camp, I masked off the outside of the window which was simpler than trying to tape plastic over the inside. Using cardboard, a black tarp, some plastic bags and gaffer's tape it was pretty quick and easy to block out all light from the window. It ain't pretty, but it's functional. 

The next step was to make lens boards with pinhole lenses. After the kids got home, we sat down to fashion them from cardboard, washers and gaffer's tape. Olivia's has a smaller hole (aperture) which would potentially give a sharper image but requiring much longer exposures; the aperture on Jack's was a bit bigger. 

Next, we finished prepping the bedroom. Initially, we just used towels on the floor to block light coming in through doors and a towel hung over the bathroom door since it had a bigger gap, let more light through. Later, we tried painter's tape. 

As I mentioned, the image in even a darkened room is a bit dim. Given that it takes about a half-hour for our eyes to become dark-adapted after being in a brightly lit room, it wasn't really practical to stay locked up in the bedroom for that long given the kids still needed to get showers after a hot day at camp and we hadn't yet had dinner. Not to mention the impatience of a 12 year-old and a 10 year-old. :-D

Instead, I pulled out my Nikon D750 with a wide angle lens and we captured the view with exposures ranging from 30 to 55 seconds. Of the images below, the first was taken before dinner while it was still pretty bright outdoors; you can see there is still direct sunlight on the fence. It was also taken with Jack's pinhole lens with it's slightly larger aperture so the image is nice and bright. The other two were taken after dinner so it was getting a bit darker outside; there is only a sliver of direct sunlight on the fence. The first one is with Olivia's pinhole lens, the second with Jack's. 

These images have been inverted vertically to emphasize the "normal" view of the backyard but that means everything in the room is upside down with the bed on top (lit blue by the sky) and the ceiling fan down "in the grass". Also, notice that the entire inside of the room is the "camera". Pretty cool!

Shot early evening with larger aperture

Shot later in evening with smaller aperture

Shot later in evening with larger aperture

We have a few other ideas for the camera obscura, interesting alternatives to explore, so stay tuned... we might have more to share soon!

As always, click on an image to see it large.

Harper and Papa Chasing the ISS

UPDATE: Keep reading for the "rest of the story" but here is the same image as below but cropped vertically to focus attention more on the ISS trail. Enjoy!

Our granddaughter Harper stayed with us this week. During the day, she was attending Dallas Parks & Recreation Outdoor Adventure Camp and the theme this week was photography. As I am an avid shutterbug I also spent a little time each evening with her, messing around with cameras, talking about how to take good pictures, etc. 

As I was checking to see what the evening weather would be with the idea that we could maybe take some night sky shots, I noticed that Tuesday evening the International Space Station (ISS) was going to be passing over. Even better, it would be rising just over downtown when seen from up by White Rock Lake. That night around 9:00 pm, we headed up to Winfrey Point and set up my Nikon D750 with an Irix 15mm wide angle lens. Once the camera was set up on the tripod, I let Harper take all the test shots and then we set the camera to shoot a sequence of 20 second shots. ISS was going to be visible for about 7 minutes, only 3 of which would be visible to the camera facing due west. After it passed overhead, we also tried capturing shots to the northeast but lights and trees were in the way.

The next day we loaded the captured images into Lightroom and I did some basic edits for exposure, contrast, etc. and then we loaded them as layers in a single image in Photoshop. As each layer contained a section of the ISS flyover, our goal was to follow instructions from this online article to stack all the images to end up with one image with a full track of the ISS, from when it was first visible (about 10 degrees above the horizon) until it passed out of the camera frame. 

Unfortunately, while the weather report had been for clear skies, there was actually a lot of haze on the horizon and clouds across the path of the ISS. Here is the result of just stacking all the images.

Harper thinks this version is kind of cool and I agree. The streaks of the clouds are pretty surreal and the airplane trails and the few star trails convey a lot of action.  The problem is that you can only get glimpses of the ISS trail as it is mostly obscured by the clouds. Even where it might have been clearly visible in one frame, once we stack all the other frames on that then some or all of it is obscured by the clouds. 

That led us to research other ways to achieve what we were after. With the help of ChatGPT, we learned some Photoshop techniques that allowed us to selectively mask out everything but the ISS trail, stack those and combine them with a base image that included the foreground with the lake and downtown Dallas and in which most of the clouds were to the right. We also removed a couple of airplane trails so that the ISS trail is the "star" of the image.

Here is the end result. It's not exactly what we intended to shoot - the ISS trail is spotty and the gaps don't always match the cloud gaps in the base image - but we are pretty happy with it. 

This was just the start, though. Now we are watching out for other nights when the ISS will fly overhead where the skies are clear and it will pass over an interesting foreground like the lake and downtown in this image. More to come!

If you are interested in finding out when the ISS flies overhead where you live, there are many resources but one of my favorites is the Heavens Above. Here is the ISS Visible Passes chart and here are the details for the flyover we captured. 

As always, click on an image to enlarge. Clear skies, y'all!

Chasing the Strawberry Moon Over Downtown Dallas - Remix

This is a remix of previously posted video of the 2023 Strawberry Moon, this time including a cropped view that better highlights the Strawberry Moon rising through the clouds behind Reunion Tower.

Watch full-screen for best view. 

Chasing the Strawberry Moon Over Dallas

Although the clouds interfered with getting a clean telephoto image of the full Strawberry Moon of 2023 above Reunion Tower in Dallas (my original goal), I was still able to capture this sequence of it through the clouds as it rose over downtown just after sunset on June 3rd. 

This is 34 minutes compressed into about 12 seconds. Watch center-frame and you'll see the moon just peak through the clouds and then pop in and out through to the end, tracing an arch up and above Reunion Tower.

Timlapse sequence captured with a Nikon D750 and Nikkor 24-120 lens at 40mm, shot from Trammel Crow Park on the Trinity River. Processed with Lightroom Classic, LRTimeLapse and Da Vinci Resolve.

See my shot of the Strawberry Moon over downtown last year here.

Music is Time's Up by Loopop, YouTube Media Library.

Watch full-screen to get the full effect. 

The Road to the Stars

The Road to the Stars
neatonjr @ Flickr

After a long session capturing images of the Milky Way in Big Bend National Park for time lapse, my son Brian and I headed back to the Chisos Basin, stopping along the way at a spot I had mapped out in PhotoPills to capture a shot with a perspective view of the road ahead with the Milky Way beyond. 

Initially the plan had been to capture a sequence of relatively short exposure images with separate foreground and sky shots at different ISO, then stacking registration frames to get the highest quality result possible. Unfortunately, just as I was setting up, we saw headlights down below. With such dark skies, the headlights were obvious while the car was still on Gano Springs Road and about 4 miles away so we knew we had 5-6 minutes but that wasn't enough to capture the planned sequence, just enough to get the composition framed and focused using test shots. I went for one 30 second shot knowing I'd get a little star trailing, then we threw everything back in the car and headed to the lodge. We had finished with enough time that the other car was still a mile or more behind us.

To pull out detail in the foreground, I did initial adjustments to the sky such as exposure, curves, white balance, etc. and then used the Lightroom sky masking tool to mask the sky, inverted it and then made adjustments to lighten the foreground. After touching up some noise spots with the healing brush, this is the end result.

Image details:
Nikon D750 on Radian tripod
Irix Firefly f/2.4 15mm lens
ISO 6400
30 seconds @ f/2.8

Click on the image to see large on Flickr. 

Enjoy! 

The Moon and the Pleiades

There are plenty of interesting sights in the night sky each year. Headlines right now are touting the 5 planets that'll be visible this week, unique because it will be easier than usual to spot Uranus (though you might still need binoculars for it and possibly for Mercury). Unfortunately, I don't expect to see that given the current forecast for cloudy weather in North Texas. 

A sight that didn't get much press but that I looked forward to was a conjunction this past Saturday evening (March 25th) between the Moon and a star cluster called the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, or Messier 45, or Subaru in Japan or many other names across time and cultures. If you ever stared up into the night sky on a winter or spring night and saw what looked like the Big Dipper but almost so small you weren't sure that's what you were seeing, that was probably the Pleiades. 

The Pleiades is located in the sky just shy of 5 degrees off the ecliptic. As that's the path that the Sun, planets and the Moon generally follow across the sky, it's not uncommon for the Moon to pass near this star cluster. But many times it occurs during the daytime, or when the Moon is full or nearly full or the Moon doesn't pass close enough to the Pleiades to appear in the same telescopic view. So seeing a conjunction of the Moon as a crescent (just five days after its New phase) and the Pleiades is not that common. I've been told this occurs about every 12 years though I haven't been able to find a concrete source for that. 

To capture this event, I drove out to Terry Park on the east shore of Lake Ray Hubbard so I would have less light pollution to deal with than at home and so that I had a clear western horizon to allow the longest amount of time to shoot between the end of twilight and when the Moon set. For this session, I used my Evostar 72ED refractor telescope, Nikon D750 camera and Star Adventurer star tracker. 

Here is a raw, unprocessed image from my session on Saturday night. 

5 day old waxing crescent Moon with Earthshine passing near the Pleiades

This is not entirely what I had in mind but it's just one of the many shots I captured. I'm working with the full set of images to come up with a shot that addresses the challenges in taking this shot. 

• In this image, the sunlit side of the Moon is overexposed. I also have shots with the sunlit side properly exposed but the shutter speed for those shots was too fast to capture the stars of the Pleiades. I am working on a blend of this shot and the other one. It's a tough edit so wish me luck.
  BTW, the shutter speed for this shot was 2 seconds while the shot with the sunlit side properly exposed had a shutter speed of 1/160th of a second. That's a huge difference, over 9 f/stops apart. Although our eyes can see such a broad dynamic range, most cameras cannot, hence the need to blend multiple images.
• I still want the final image to have the rest of the Moon also dimly illuminated. This is called Earthshine because, well, it is the result of sunshine reflected off the Earth lighting up the part of the Moon that's not lit by the Sun. 
• I want to bring out the stars of the Pleiades better so that they aren't washed out by the Moonlight. However, it will just be a matter of the individual stars being a bit brighter.
  If you have seen images of the Seven Sisters like this one with lots of blue nebulosity surrounding them, it wasn't possible to capture the reflection nebulae that surrounds the stars of the Pleiades with the bright glare of the Moon so close by. 

I'll describe the post-processing I'm doing when I post the final image. 

More to come. 

As always, click on the image to see big.

PS. Here is my EarthSky community photo post of this image.

The Green Comet

Well, the first thing that came to mind seeing news headlines about The Green Comet was a flashback to the 60s TV show The Green Hornet staring Bruce Lee. :-)

Seriously, this has been a newsworthy comet. While it wasn't bright enough to be seen except under very dark skies and/or with optical assistance like a telescope, as you know if you've followed the news, it is a singularly unique solar system visitor. Check out sites like EarthSky.org for more details and some of the more interesting images. 

For my part, I had hoped to capture comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) with my rig (Evostar 72ED on a Star Adventurer tracker, using a Nikon D750). Unfortunately, the North Texas weather hasn't cooperated. Last week when it was at its closest to Earth (and at its brightest magnitude), we were in the throes of a winter storm. By the time we had a night with relatively clear skies on Friday night, we also had a nearly full Moon. It was also still very cold outside. If it had been a moonless night, I'd have packed things up and headed out east of town to darker skies to shoot but since I knew the Moon was going to make it hard to get really good shots, I just set up in my backyard. At least I could duck inside from time to time to warm up. 

Here is the result. See below for more on how it was created. 

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) captured in my backyard
February 3rd, 2023

Between the light pollution and the glare of the Moon, it was hard for me to pull out much detail but you can at least see the dim fuzzball of the comet's core. The comet was in a region of the sky without any bright stars but the few brighter ones on the right side of the image are in the constellation Camelopardalis.

Still, it was time well spent. It was the first time I've gone through the process of capturing what are called calibration frames (bias, darks, flats), additional shots taken to improve astrophotography images by accounting for things like sensor noise and dust. It is also the first time I have processed using calibration frames; I took 100 images (20 seconds each) and post-processed them and the calibration frames using a software tool called Siril and then finished in Photoshop. 

Capturing a comet is often tricky since it is moving at a different rate than the stars. Using a star tracker (vs. a telescope mount), my only choice was to track the stars and hope to be able to post-process the comet and stars separately then combine them afterwards. I did that but it took a long time and many tries just to get the results above. I wish I had more data but longer exposures weren't possible since the histogram showed that any longer than 20 seconds at ISO 3200 would have resulted in clipping (i.e., the blue was almost lost to the right side at 30 seconds). On top of that, the comet would have blurred if I used too long an exposure given how fast it was moving.

One of the other tools I learned how to use is Astrometry.net which can do something called plate solving, taking an image and finding where in the sky it is a view of. Here is the results of plate solving using one of the images used to create the shot above. I find this raw, astrometrically-labeled view an interesting alternative version of my night's labors since the comet (though not green) stands out a bit more.

The three dots and labels represent stars in the constellation
Camelopardalis identified using plate solving on astrometry.net

Anyway, the next time I am shooting a dim fuzzy (hopefully without the Moon up and away from city light pollution), I'll have had some practice and expect to be able to produce much better results. 

Stay tuned...

Click on an image to see full-screen. 

Total Lunar Eclipse from Florida Keys

Home from our trip, I finally got a chance to go through the shots I took last Tuesday morning (November 8, 2022) of the total lunar eclipse from my brother- and sister-in- law's house in Islamorada, Florida on Lower Matecumbe Key. This view is looking to the west over Florida Bay.

I shot from about 4:30am EST until about 6:15am EST when morning twilight washed out the eclipsed Moon. I would have started earlier as the eclipse started at 3:03am EST but the view was obscured by the clouds when I went out to shoot, finally clearing about 4:20am EST.

I've shot lunar eclipses where the Moon appeared larger than this but for this project I needed a wide angle view, allowing me to capture individual lunar disks reflecting the changes in the Moon's appearance through each phase of the eclipse. My goal is to create a composite shot with multiple lunar images spaced across a shot like this. The individual lunar disks will run in an arc from near the top of the image, right down between these two palm trees, each lower than the previous as the Moon got closer and closer to the horizon. I used the Stellarium sky app and the PhotoPills planning app with its augmented reality view to plan where to set up for this shot and confirm it would look like I had in mind. 

Creating the composite image is going to take a little work (combining data from about 15 shots taken once every 7 minutes) so stay tuned and I'll post when it is finished.

In the meantime, I was pleased with this image taken near the beginning of morning twilight so thought I'd go ahead and share it now. It's also highlighted on EarthSky.org here.

Enjoy!

Click on image to view full screen.

Equipment Details:

Nikon D750, Nikkor 24-120mm lens at 24mm, Peak travel tripod, camera control with qDSLRDashboard app on Pixel 5, planning with PhotoPills and Stellarium apps on Pixel Slate

Post-processing Details:

Lightroom: minor exposure adjustment, applied lens profile and chromatic aberration adjustment, transform to correct distorted perspective, crop

Photoshop: burning to reduce brightness of dock lights, dodging to slightly increase brightness of moon against twilight sky, use sky mask and a noise filter to reduce color banding when saving to PNG file format