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. 

The Moon and the Pleiades, Edited

As a follow-on to my last post, I've taken my first pass at using some of the shots I took that night at differing shutter speeds to create a composite image with a higher dynamic range, representing both the sunlit and Earthshine portion of the Moon similar to how it appeared to the human eye. Combined with the stars of the Pleiades, this is close to what I had in mind for the image. A lot closer than the raw image in the previous post. 😃

As always, click on the image to see large. 

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.

Moon and Five Planets over Downtown Dallas Skyline - This Time With the Pleiades

 

In my last post, I described my efforts to capture an interesting image with the Moon and all five naked-eye planets lined up in the order of their orbits out from the Sun. As the conditions on June 24th were not ideal and elusive Mercury was mostly lost in the haze over Downtown Dallas, I tried again on Sunday, June 26th. The sky was much clearer (at least over the Dallas skyline) and there was less haze. Thankfully, staying up almost all night a second time was definitely worth it!

In the image above, I've added an enlarged insert of each object and labeled them to give everyone a more clear idea of what they are looking at without having to click on the image to see it full screen and then zoom in to tell what each object is. The original, unlabeled image is also included below. 

While the surprise on Friday's outing was the ISS flyby (I'm still working on the timelapse videos from both Friday and Sunday), the surprise in these images is that I also captured the Pleiades star cluster (M45), which you may know as the Seven Sisters (immortalized in the Subaru logo)! 

Another difference between this image and the one from the 24th is that the Moon is "older", now 28 days through its cycle (vs. 26 days on the 24th). Just two days from being a New Moon, in this image it is a thin crescent, only 4% illuminated. However, thanks to the length of the exposure (2 seconds), the camera captured not just the sun-lit crescent but it also captured earthshine, the portion of the Moon not in sunlight but still lit but the sunlight reflected off of the Earth. 

For anyone interested in how this image was created, I started out by taking multiple shots with a Nikon D750 and the kit lens, a Nikkor 24-105mm f/4 lens set to it's widest at 24mm. Each of the 6 images used were taken in portrait orientation and, using a tripod, I started shooting to the left of Mercury, then moved the camera about 35 degrees to the right so that the next shot would be overlapped with the previous, continuing until I had the final shot including Saturn. Each image was taken at ISO 200, f/4 and as noted above, exposed for 2 seconds.  The screenshot to the right was my shooting plan from PhotoPills with the red dot representing my location on the west levee of the Trinity river and the black dot representing the Bank of America Plaza tower (the tallest building in Dallas, the one in the panorama with the bright green lights), about 1.6 miles away. The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, the white suspension bridge arch in the center of the panorama, crosses the Trinity.  The lighter dashed lines with black dots represent the left, center and right of the field of view in the panorama. 

Post-processing involved using software (Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw) to merge the 6 shots into one panorama, then crop and apply adjustments for exposure, sharpness, etc. Next, I edited that image in Photoshop to add the insets and labels. As the merged image exhibited some color banding in the morning twilight sky, I used a technique involving adding a little noise to the image to reduce the banding. Note that I also took some creative license with this shot, editing the inset of the Pleiades to emphasize the major stars so it would be more recognizable.

As always, click an image to view full-screen. Enjoy!

Rough Draft: Timelapse of Longest Lunar Eclipse in 1000 Years

As mentioned in my last post, I used my Nikon D750 DSLR mounted on a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer tracker to capture about 5 hours of the partial lunar eclipse. Here is a preliminary time lapse video. 

This sequence is just from the shots exposed for the sunlight face of the moon. I'm working on another sequence with full lunar surface, blending shots exposed for sunlight and shadow. The blended shots will showcase the redness of the lunar surface at mid-eclipse. They will also include the Pleiades and a tighter crop. 

The movement of the moon in this sequence is not due to its movement across the sky but the moon drifting out of center-frame due to the polar alignment of tracker being a little bit off. I'm still working on a process to re-align the sequence and to rotate the view for a more natural orientation of the sky.

When watching the video, be patient as there are a few seconds in the middle where it goes black. The shots used in this video were taken at f/6.3, 2500th of a second, ISO 800. It turns out that was slightly underexposed for a sunlit lunar surface during the phase where the Moon was mostly eclipsed, I missed capturing the portion of its surface still reflecting sunlight so nothing shows up.  

More to come...

BTW, for a better view, select full screen (box icon, lower right) when playing the video. 

Chasing A Partial Lunar Eclipse and the Seven Sisters

In the early morning hours of November 19, 2021, a lunar eclipse began. As a partial eclipse, it normally might not have been noteworthy. What brought a lot of media attention about this one is that it lasted just a shade over 6 hours. It's been 1000 years since the last time a lunar eclipse lasted that long. 

The timing for this eclipse is such that the Moon was almost at apogee, the point where it is furthest from the Earth in its orbit, and since a body in orbit moves slower the further it is from the body it orbits, the Moon spent more time in Earth's shadow. It also meant that the Moon was smaller in appearance so this was the opposite of a "Super Moon". 

The other interesting thing about this lunar eclipse is that the Moon is within a few degrees of the collection of stars known as the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. As both were high in the sky during most of the eclipse, the cold dry air we had in North Texas that night made for great viewing. 

Initially, my plan to capture the eclipse was to shoot with my Nikon D750 using the longest lens I have and the Star Adventurer sky tracker to capture shots of the lunar face throughout the night to create a timelapse video. However, given the close proximity of the Pleiades, I decided to shoot with a shorter lens and include it in the view. 

I won't go into the technical details but given this was really the first time I had used the Star Adventurer for tracking more than a few minutes, I shot a bit wider view than I probably needed to so the Moon is rather small in the frame. The bad news is that the tracker was a little off and so the Moon didn't stay centered in the frame. The good news is that with the wider view, both it and the Seven Sisters were in-frame throughout the 5 hours of the eclipse I captured. 

Here is a frame from about mid-eclipse. I'll post more as I get further through post-processing all the images.