On Loss and Processing

What an interesting week it's been!  New Lenses, Tips and tricks from the pros, new design work, a meteor shower par excellence and general all-around starryness.  Oh and I even updated the blog, quite substantially.

From the top then.

last Friday was the Geminids, so of course an expedition was organised!  Off we went to the very summit of Conical Peak, thereby getting us about a 300 degree view of the sky.  I shot over 400 shots, didn't geta  single meteor.  Oh wells ...

gfkBill did tho, as you can see below :)

I did all this with my new present to myself, a Samyang 14mm lens .. perfect for those wide wide shots like this shot of us at the setup phase:

Present were gfkBill, Jeremy, Jax, Michelle and Jeremy's relations (Hi Kim!) :)  So lots of shots were snapped, with varying degrees of success, which led me onto my Monday ...

While processing the shots, I thought I would be cheeky and drop Fraser Gunn an unsolicited email in Tekapo ... essentially asking (begging) him if he needed an assistant .. and much to my surprise he replied, unfortunately he didn't need one, but he spent the next 3 days giving me some coaching online.  What an AWESOME guy!

He shared tips for focussing, shooting, iso, conditions most importantly, helped me with my processing.

I know know about averaging to get rid of camera noise .. this is an awesome and highly effective way to clean up ISO noise in your shots, and it works like this ... (I will let Cambridge in Colour explain it for me)

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-averaging-noise.htm

So, moving on from that, Fraser helped me work through a shot of Crux I had taken on the night, showing me the methods he uses to process his shots, I have done a comparison image of what I tried by myself, then tried averaging, then started using Lightroom's Chromatic Aberration removal tools to try and correct my focus, then tried an average + stack just for good measure.  I will write this up into a tutorial on the weekend for the tips and tricks page, so keep an eye out for that.

You can see how Fraser gets a whole BAGLOAD of detail out of his method, and of course if you want to check out the originals of these (apart from Frasers), they're up on Flickr:

NASA found a river on Titan this week!  A BIG river .. this is totally awesome :)

But on a sadder note, we lost Sir Patrick Moore this week, he has rejoined the universe, we will miss him, but he gave astronomy such a lot.  Farewell Sir.

April Skies

Well here we are in April already.  I apologise for my lack of activity of late, lots of things happening around my life at the moment, including injuries, physiotherapy and notably, a burglary.  Which, it has to be said, sucked. They got my telescope lenses and our camera.

So Bill is doing awesome work with the tracker at the moment, I wont be shooting for a while :(

Dear Canon NZ, any chance of a free 5D? Mk II will do, I'm not greedy!

In other news, the Hike to the Stars event we all planned and spent money on camping gear to organise was totally cancelled due to the worsening weather, so we're thinking October/November now, or possibly a smaller expedition will happen later, anyone whose interested should watch this space!

Anyways, on to the skies this month, as that's supposed to be the purpose of this post.

Jupiter and Venus will be visible early in the evening sky this month, after being a pair of drama queens last month.  Mars is still out and about and getting dimmer and smaller as we pull away from it. Saturn, that beautiful gem, is up in the northern sky and Titan is well visible about 4 ring-diameters from the planet, an awesome site and if you want to see it, come over, and bring your own lenses because I no longer have any :(

The usual suspects are around this month, Crux, Orion, Scorpio, both Magellanic clouds (see Bill's awesome photos),

Mercury makes a good looking morning sky appearance this month, rising due east 2 hours before the sun in the middle of April, in the beginning of the month, it's "only" 95,000,000km from us!

As usual I will be updating the 1200mm Calendar with what I can find this month (Google-Fu pending of course).  Speaking of Calendars, I have added some calendars to 1200mm's including:  Cassini's tour of the Saturn System,

Oh and the blog got it's 10,000th page view this week! YAY!

Anyways ... keep looking up guys!



Interesting and/or Awesome things!

• Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Overview
• Starry starry night
• Venus and Jupiter cuddling up in night sky
• One last show for Venus, Jupiter and moon
• Saturn's Rings & Biggest Moon Dazzle in New Photo

Half a Century ...

As I sit here editing tonights images, midnight rolls over and we have been a space-faring species for 50 years.  What a thought.  What a stunning, sobering and amazing thought ...

Yuri Gagarin flew only one space mission. On April 12, 1961 he became the first human to orbit Earth. Gagarin's spacecraft, Vostok 1, circled Earth at a speed of 27,400 kilometers per hour. The flight lasted 108 minutes. At the highest point, Gagarin was about 327 kilometers above Earth.

Colonel Yuri Gagarin died on March 27, 1968 when the MiG-15 he was piloting crashed near Moscow. At the time of his death, Yuri Gagarin was in training for a second space mission.

So tonight I went on out to try some tests on stacking, with limited success.  Shooting at 400 ISO, I seem to lose a lot of detail, so much so that a 97-image stack isn't bringing up any of the milky way around Crux (my target for tonight).  However 800 ISO is giving some promising results, still a little noisier than I would like, but a step in the right direction - 13 images.

I found a nice place to shoot however, nice and dark, although the moon was washing out my shots like crazy business, it's looking like I might be back on moon shots for a while now.

So that's it for the 50th anniversary.  I don't really have the right words to express just how cool I think that is, I know that humans are out of space for now, until it gets commercial anyways, but still, as Yuri lifted off 50 years ago, our species took a step towards its maturity, a step away from the cradle of humanity.

Astro Safari!

Ok, finally got a chance to review my shots from our Leigh night safari last week. This is my best shot so far... ok, probably my best shot full stop. Over 80 shots, 3 hours, 1 good one. Ain't that the way sometimes? A great night anyway, gorgeous stars, amazing view with Auckland on the horizon to the south, and Whangarei to the north.


Hires on Flicker

The Stars, Kiwiana and gfkBill strikes a pose

What an awesome night last night.  Leigh/Pakiri was DARK! Not to mention Auckland on the horizon, and all-round awesome views!  1200mm team was out in force .. IE Bill and I went a-shooting.  And without further ado, here's what we got :)

In the first one, Bill strikes a pose as the Milky Way revolves behind him, and in the second the LMC hovers over Rangitoto and the rest of the landscape.

 

Then there's the Southern Cross over the Punga trees - I mean what could be more Kiwi?!? And finally, my fav shot of the night, I love the combination of the man made and the Milky Way.  There were of course some more, which you will see as soon as I do some more post on them.  Speaking of Post .. 3200ISO shots are very nice, but getting the noise out of them isn't.

HUGE thanks to gfkBill for the night.  Check his Flickr stream for his pics as they come up!

The plan? The plan is victory!

Just come back from the moonrise on Martins Bay .. and yes, the plan was victory!  usual focus issues, star trail issues and almost losing my glasses, not to mention the tide chasing me up the beach ... but DAMN it was worth it ....

Here's a taster, more to come!

Check out Antares!

w00t!  Watch this space!

Rising Stars

Good evening all .. and of course, Happy Holidays

I got an awesome script running for CHDK tonight .. my first timelapse.  CHDK is allowing me to make basically 8 megapixel movies of the stars moving around, using photographic settings :)

I has a happy! Here's why:  http://www.vimeo.com/8367629

The video is shot here in Te Awamutu facing roughly south-wards .. you can see the Southern Cross (Crux Australis) rising across the top left hand corner - real Kiwi Icon :)  I'm obviously needing things like better ISO settings and exposure control, but for a first time, I'm pretty happy with this.  My goal in this is to get a really good looking timelapse ... including the milky way if possible ...

As we draw near the end of the International Year of Astronomy, and the first 2 months of my astro-blog I'm thinking that this photography thing is way more complicated than I originally thought of.  Also, am looking forward to the next 5 years or so - New Horizons gets to Pluto in July 2015 - now that's going to be cool!   NASA has the Kepler project well underway .. looking for Earth-like planets around other stars and there's lot and lots of beautiful things to look at.

As for the blog, I have tried to keep it focussed on the sky, and my attempts to photograph it.  Hope you've enjoyed it so far.

Hope your holidays go well and you have a good time now and in the new year!!