The Icy Quads

  A short time-lapse video of the Quadrantid Meteor Shower from my back yard.  I caught several good meteor flashes, including one which left a billowing smoke trail visible for two whole minutes.  Follow the link to my Vimeo site to watch in High Definition.

High Definition Version on Vimeo

High Definition Version on Vimeo

Happy New Year

High Definition Version on Vimeo

  I let the tracker follow Orion across the New Year's Eve night until the clouds rolled in and obscured the view early in 2012.  Make sure to watch the high definition version.  The regular just doesn't do the stars justice.

Little by Little...

  I've been working a lot with the images that have quickly been piling up on my hard drive since I first bought my telescope.  Astrophotography is a strange form of photography for me.  I've always kind of hated Photoshop and software gimmicks because it feels like cheating to me.  I've always tried to keep my editing changes to the whole image.  Now with astrophotography I'm forced to combine tens or even hundreds of images down to a single picture and really stretch the color and exposure to bring out the detail.  I think I might be alright with that.  I really like the pictures that I'm getting and actually feel they are representative, but it still feels feels like cheating.

Flickr Horizontal Version

  The Great Orion Nebula with another night's worth of data added in to enhance the trapezium stars and nebulosity.

The Universe Today Guide to the Night Sky - January

The Universe Today Guide to the Night Sky - January 2012

  I was checking out one of my favorite websites on astronomy and they happened to post a guide to the night sky for the month of January.  I was reading through it and when I came to the section on Orion I suddenly said, "Dang, that picture looks a lot like mine..."

The Universe Today Guide to the Night Sky - January 2012

Earthshine

  Some of the neighbors came over to look through binoculars and my telescope setup in the back yard.  It was a lot of fun and was awesome to have someone else to talk to about the sky, new targets to point the scopes at, and of course our dream telescopes.

  When I first went out to put the telescope up, the small crescent moon was getting ready to set above the tree line and the neighbors house.  It really is amazing how good the human eye is at some things.  Looking at the crescent moon, the eye can properly expose both the light AND dark of the moon AT THE SAME TIME!!!  I wish my camera could do that.  Here is the moon exposed to bring out the earthshine glow of the dark section.  It is illuminated solely by the double reflected light bouncing off the earth, off the moon, and then finally back down to us.

The Video Advantage -

  I woke at 4:30am Christmas morning because the dog kicked me in the neck.  After shoving the brown bear away from my face and the prime real estate of the bed, I happened to wake enough to see what time it was and was warm enough to check what the sky looked like outside the window.  It was crystal clear and I decided to throw the telescope outside and take my first real look at Saturn.  Honestly the most beautiful planet in the solar system, I have only had one brief glimpse of it since being shown to the eyepiece of the telescope by my father as a small child.  I'm not sure if the memory is real, or if it is just recreated in my mind, but regardless, seeing it once again is awe inspiring.  Currently, my camera cannot capture just how good it looks visually in even my 4" telescope.  I hope to get some better representations up on the blog before the new year.

  I also took a couple of minutes of video.  Using software called Registax, I was able to combine several minutes of video in to a single image.  The software is able to filter out the flutter and wiggle of the atmosphere to make a much sharper image of planets.  It's pretty amazing.  I can't wait to get a bigger scope...

Getting Fainter

  Finally did some research, and this picture comprises M42 - The Great Orion Nebula, M43 is the small but bright bit of nebulosity just to the top of the bright trapezium stars, separated by the lane of dark dust.  The blue nebula to the top is called "the Running Man Nebula" or NGC 1973/1975/1977.

  I promise that I'm still taking pictures of things other than stars.  It's just the thing that I'm currently obsessing about during my short windows of free time to edit on the computer.

  I was finally fortunate enough to get a window of semi-clear skies and got to set up my scope for a good run at Orion. I have a new sky-glow filter that lets me combat the haze from Boulder, and I wanted to see how long I could push the exposures now.  I started at three minutes and worked my way up to ten minutes at ISO 1600.  Ten minutes actually gave me an amazingly good looking black where the sky in fact should be black.  It's hard to do test shots that last ten minutes, so I went and got a pillow and a big piece of cardboard and laid down on the concrete in my big down puffy and practiced the names of stars while I waited for the shutter.  I was really happy with the faint nebulosity that showed up in these longer exposures, especially in the blue reflection nebula to the north of M42.  Now I need to work on some combined exposures so that I don't lose all of the detail around the bright trapezium stars.