I was quite determined that I shouldn't let another year pass from my last post. The trip last week which was a failed Orionids attempt gave me an opportunity capture a well understood, but less known phenomenon relating to the Moon. Given the International Observe the Moon Day already a day behind (28th of Oct), I figured I'll make use ...
Facebook reminded me that almost three years ago I posted a crescent Venus. Coincidentally (or may be not so much, given the climate and periodicity of Venus as evening star), I had another shot of Venus compiled last week. And here we go:Venus - NexStar 4SE, Canon 550D in 640x320 crop mode and Celestron 2x barlow.While going through my shots, ...
Owing to somewhat kinder weather, managed to have a small window two days ago for some astrophotography.Luckily for me, Orion becomes a good target straight from my balcony.M42, or the Orion Nebula is the first nebula that I tried to shoot. My first attempt was very unsuccessful and all I managed to get was a light patch that showed where ...
My last attempt at photographing Saturn was posted on an FB group and one of the members quickly pointed out that me shooting at a high ISO shouldn't necessarily give that bad of an image. After experimenting with a few different stackings, I got some interesting results.100 frames In my previous attempt (pictured above), I stacked only 100 frames of ...
The Saturn opposition took place on 3rd June 2016 and was incidentally having a close approach with Earth. Tried my luck a few days after and it didn't turn up too bad.Saturn - 6th June 2016. 4SE and Canon 550D with 2x Barlow (Samyang). A stack of 150 frames on 640x480 crop mode.An opposition does not always mean that the ...
On 30th May 2016, Mars had a close approach to Earth (being only 46.8million miles from Earth). The photo below was taken few days after.Mars - 04th June 2016. Nexstar 4SE, Canon 550D with 2x barlow (Samyang mirror lens accessory)The photo is a result of stacking 25 frames of a avi made in 640x480 60fps movie crop mode. Since the ...
It seems like my last post was more than 11 months ago. Due to my job change and severe weather in Sri Lanka (more specifically Colombo), I have not been able to get in to astrophotography much. I had dropped my expectations a bit when we started getting freak showers last week (again) but then I noticed that towards the ...
The year 2015 kicked off with a new comet incoming. Comet C/2014 Q2 is still on its approach towards the sun and is expected to be closest to the sun on 30th Jan. Right now it is just inside the constellation Eridanus Just below Orion.Cutting the mumbo-jumbo out:The details of the comet can be described well using the standard astronomy ...
About a month or so back I realised that there is another problem with the 4SE, it wouldn't power up. Firstly I thought this was due to a battery drain, and that's the first thing I tried.While it worked once, after about half an hour of sky watching it stopped working again. It is quite improbable for a new set ...
A giant sunspot group, AR2192, has formed on the sun again, and the group is now larger than the largest sunspot group we saw last year, making this the biggest sunspot group in the decade.AR2192 - 500mm Samyang Mirror Lens, Baader Solar Filter If you would like to know how big this really is, have a look at this image ...
I have not been able to do any decent astrophotogaphy sessions recently. The rains are here and here comes the lightening shots.I'm fascinated of how it always strikes over the sea. All photos were taken with a 30s exposure F8.0 and F5.6 on a tripod. That actually makes it easier to capture lightening. You don't really have to do anything. ...
Few days back, when I was trying to do some random stellar observations, I realised that the 4SE wasn't aligning properly and the goto function was off a little more than you'd expect. Given that weather wasn't on my side, I decided to let it go for the moment. I finally made a one star alignment and was trying to ...
Since it is the monsoon season again, I've been thinking of writing something about astrophotography rather than actually engaging in it. Coincidentally, one of my friends sent in an article based on some scholarly work where the team was working on combining deep space photos that are general public to create more detailed photos which are comparable with the ones ...
During a failed attempt to observe and photograph the Camelopardalids meteor shower, I found out that the finderscope of the 4SE was not working. If you have not done this, try doing it, it is ridiculously hard to successfully aim the telescope at anything if your finderscope is not working.After testing with multiple batteries, my immediate worry was that the ...
I was going to wait till I get a good shot of Mercury before I posted this. But it is unlikely that I would be able to do stargazing in the next few weeks, so decided to put up what I managed to capture yesterday and today.Venus - 25th Jan 2014Mars - 26th Jan 2014Jupiter - 26th Jan 2014Saturn - ...
This is a good month to spot the planets, the whole five of them which are visible to the naked eye.As soon as the sun sets, check the western skies and you will see a very bright star very close to the horizon. This is in fact not a star but the planet closest to the sun, Mercury.Mercury - Evening ...
The year 2014 started off with a discovery of a giant sunspot group later named AR1944. NASA stated that the group was one of the largest seen in the last nine years. Out of pure coincidence, I managed to capture an image of the group on 5th Jan and I repeated the exercise today after learning that I caught an ...
If you are a owner of a camera which has more than 10x zoom (better yet if you have a DSLR and a zoom lens longer than 100mm), you have a good chance of catching Jupiter with its moon on photo today.Jupiter is closest to Earth today. This means it passes roughly around 628 million km from Earth compared to ...
2013 was (supposedly) an awesome year for astronomy. I actually thought it should've been called the Year of Comets with 5 comets going past. 2013 also came in with two solar eclipses, one annular and a rare hybrid eclipse (the last hybrid solar eclipse prior to 2013 occurred in 2005).Looking forward to 2014, here's what we got:Meteor ShowerJan 3,4Quadrantids meteor ...
