Black Heli... er, Satellites

  So ValHallen and I headed north last night for some shooting, motivated primarly by the arrival of a (working) USB OTG cable so he could control his 60D from his Nexus tablet. I'll let him post about that in his own time. For now, let's cast our minds back a few weeks.

  On our Geminid shoot, I'd taken a stack pointing towards Auckland, above Crux. When I reviewed the shots for the stack the next day, I was startled to see satellite trails through the images. "Startled by satellite trails? You must be new to this..." you say. You would be well within your rights to say so. Except in this case it was twin trails, offset by a few degrees and one trailing the other, but dead parallel. "Ah! Now that is more interesting!" you exclaim. And again, you'd be right. Subsequent extensive and intensive research (ie, I Googled it and it came up right away) leads me to think it's likely they're these. Fun! Nasa's new radiation-belt-studying twins have only been up there for 4 months and I snapped them quite by accident. Here's the stack, with the sat's photoshopped back in, as stacking killed them of course. If you don't know why stacking killed them, you must be new to this...

Trails just left of centre, near the top of the image, click to embiggen.

Twin Streaks on Flickr

  That was a few weeks ago, and should have been the end of a mildly interesting story. But at this point, things start to become a little Sinister! Yes, Sinister! Capital S and exclamation mark fully intended!

 Back in the present,I sat down this morning to go through the shots from last night, up on a beach near here. I'd barely glanced through the first dozen of the forty-odd snaps when there they were, brighter and bolder than ever - the same two satellites! Shooting towards Lesser Megallanic this time, but no doubting they're the Twin Streaks I'd caught above.

Twin Streaks II on Flickr

  This the first time we'd been back out on photo safari together since the Geminids.What are the odds the satellites would again be overhead? I don't think they're studying the Van Allen belts at all. I think they're spying on our photo safaris! Two astro-photogrophers, two satellites... think about it, people! We've reached the point where Nasa is clearly getting jealous of the quality of our photos, and our bang-to-buck ratio, and is concerned about their funding. That they're not trying to hide suggests to me a veiled threat. I'm posting this publicly before they can get to me. If I disappear tell my family I love them.

Look to the skies, people! Look to the skies!

- gfkBill

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.

Mars Boner!

Oh Hai!  I iz on yr Marz, stealing yr Vistas!

Curiouser and Curiouser

NASA, after landing a 1-ton, nuclear powered car on Mars, is now getting back some awesome imagery ...

First colour pic is in.  Looks like a dusty day on the red planet :)

Also, the other mars hardware is checking in .. the MRO has grabbed some awesome pics of the rover, heatshield and skycrane ... find those over at Space.com ... here.

In more local news, the Persid meteor shower peaks on Sunday night NZ time, with a rate of roughly 60 meteors per hour, would be a good night to be lying on a blanket under the open sky - if of course you have a sky, forecast here is for showers :(

We are down!

DOWN SAFE!!! She's down!  Data from the surface of Mars!!!!!!!!

Waiting for the first images now!!!  History being made .....

Go Nasa!

And here we go:
https://twitter.com/NASA/status/232350219700932608/photo/1

I have something in my eye :)

And she's heading down!

Just passed Crew Stage separation!  Heading for the 7 minutes of Terror!!  Go you good thing!!!

7 Minutes of Terror

5th August Guys ... Curiosity touches down on Mars ... if it can get through this:


Thanks BoingBoing

Space is Beautiful

A View of Earth from Saturn (Photo credit: alpoma)Some pretty pretty things from space :)

What Space Looks Like to Kids
Earth as Art
Hubblicious!
Apod!
Nasa Image of the Day
Space.com Best Space Photos

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

Love, Joy, a new star in the East... must be Christmas!

Christmas Eve down under, and an early morning wake-up call for the boys was rewarded with some great views of Comet Lovejoy. Initially we were disappointed to hop out of our beds and convene at Val's house, only to find the horizon cloudy - then realised there was a pretty glorious comet sitting above said clouds. Cue rush for cameras!

I think we both probably ended up with one decent shot each as we were about half an hour too late to avoid the sun making it's presence felt. Nevertheless it was well worth the 4am alarm, and should reward early risers for a few more days. The wise men can't be far away...



[Val]
Urrrrgh, yeah, what he said about the 4am thing.  I got a couple of good shots, unfortunately, my best one was my first one, making it hella out of focus.  Oh, and Bill, traditionally a comet appears when a prince dies, rather than when one is born ;)

Nebulinks 23 November

Ok, so not done one for a few days, this of course means that This is going to have to be a bigger one!  Enjoy the links!

The View from Chajnantor:

Russia, France to team up on new launchers:

CHAPS Pressure Suits Evaluated During Simulated Missions In Centrifuge:

Name That Telescope Array - News Blog - SkyandTelescope.com:

New satellite gets INSANELY hi-res view of Earth | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine:

News Update: Hubble & Spitzer Heir to Open Eye to Cosmos in Search for Signatures of Life:

NASA - Expedition 29 Crew Lands:

China plans major effort in pursuing manned space technology:

Images Captured with DMK 21 and DBK 21 Camera:

Countdown! NASA's Dream-Machine Search for Mars' Life Imminent:

Color of the Moon:

NASA Satellite "Drove Over" the Cloud Streets of Hudson Bay | Flickr - Photo Sharing!:
NASA - Claritas Fossae, Mars:

Nebulinks 20 November

Well! NASA is at it again (we love NASA)

New NASA missions to investigate how Mars turned hostile
Cygnus X-1: A Stellar Mass Black Hole:
Saturn's Northern Storm:
In Wolf s Cave:
NASA Extends MESSENGER Mission 

and just for a change ...
Cosmic particle accelerators get things going

And the pretties ...
A History of the Sky

Also, my partner in the stars, gfkBill flew off to Taiwan this morning for a week. No stars for him in the big cities!  He did leave me the tracker tho, so I will be playing a round with that :D

Safe journey bro

Nebulinks: 18 November

Scumbag Nasa!

Waits till 2 days after my first ever article is posted then releases the Highest-Resolution Map of the Moon Ever *sigh*  no matter what you do with this hobby, NASA always wins ... here's why:

NASA Orbiter Catches Mars Sand Dunes in Motion:
NASA Spacecraft Data Suggest Water Flowing on Mars:
Close Encounters of the Galactic Kind:
@NASAJPL: A #3DThursday look at the ...

but that's ok NASA, I forgive you, just keep em coming guys!
Europa's ocean stuffs here:

Then here's some cool and pretty things ...

Midnight sun, hourly:

Marco Mahler - Recycling Art - Tom Samui:

Welder's Glass on a 7D | Flickr - Photo Sharing!:

Psychedelic Saturn storm! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine:

Nebulinks

Planning a Twilight Shot:
NASA - NASA Probe Data Show Evidence Of Liquid Water On Icy Europa:
Light from the Vacuum

and Just cos I like pretty things:
Pixar's New Trailer

Also, found this one from @Astro_Ron, he has the best view of the moon ...
https://plus.google.com/photos/116214152295449083654/albums/5666051127624568881

Nebulinks

NASA - Montage:

Just goes to show that no matter how good you get ... NASA always wins.  While we're on the subject of NASA ...

Voyager's Backup Thrusters Ignited for Deep Space Eternity:

GO YOU LITTLE BEAUTY GO!!!

Today's things ...

BREAKING: Another Jupiter impact? | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Mars Rover surpasses Viking -1 record

and this is very interesting, and inspiring ...

The Mars Underground

And this from @BrianShiro ... Life on Titan?

Ninib, Kronos, the Protector and Sower of the Seed.

Oh yum yum .. and they're the big pictures too!

And since we're talking about one of my favorite NASA missions (Cassini/Huygens), here's this and this and this.
It seems Saturn makes everyone poetic, hardly surprising, it is magnificent.

In other news, I picked up some more gear recently - yesterday was at Mitre10 Mega in Albany, getting the ingredients for a scotch mount, there will be a photo journal of that.  I want to just say a big thanks to Mitre10 Mega tho, you guys were awesome!

Also got a remote for the 20D today, which means I can do Bulb long exposure stuff, on the scotch mount and off it (SLR StarTrails anyone?)

Two Worlds, One Sun

Two Worlds, One Sun - damn this is cool ...

Ooooo! And so's this:  http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1670.html

Nothing tangible from last night

Which will make Bill happier as it's not quite as spooky really.  I am embroiled in an art test for a job atm, so not much to show really .. I did runa test on my IXUS capability for timelapse last night, and the camera ran out of room on SD card before it ran out of batteries :) Took 3 hours and 45 mins (approx) to fill us the card with JPGs :)

Some news coming up of a trip in the works, to My Cook and Tekapo kater in the year - so some gazing will be done there, if it all comes together :)

More as things happen ...

Meanwhile, here's this:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1667.html

and this:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1668.html

A month of missed links ...

A Mosaic of Cassiopeia, Huygens on Titan, Winds of Change, Iceberg Collision and Eye to Eye on Flying.

The Crab, Blast Off, Brand New World, Coming Home and A Window to the World.

There is of course more, but y'all know where NASA is right?