Moon and Venus - 06th Dec 2013This was the view from my balcony when I returned home today, and that is what prompted me to take the next photo.The photo above, is very unlikely to be what you think it is. No it's not the Moon. It is in fact the planet Venus.Sometimes called the twin sister of Earth, Venus ...
There is one photo that I thought I would never be able to take from Sri Lanka. I was thinking of going to the northern most corners just to see if it would provide a good view for this. Seems like you don't have to try that hard.Polaris and Big Dipper. Polaris is at the dead center of the bottom ...
Composite image of Jupiter (16x1/80sec ISO400) and Galilean Moons (1x1/10sec ISO800)The photo is a composite image of a high exposure shot to bring up the Galilean moons and a stacked image of Jupiter. The image of Jupiter might be the best I've done so far.Jupiter 16x1/80 ISO 400 stacked on Registax
Today (03rd November 2013) marks the last eclipse for the year of 2013 and it is a total solar eclipse for some areas in the world. Although Sri Lanka is not in that list, if you want to see how it looks like, there is someone webcasting it as it happens:SLOOH - Total Solar Eclipse or embedded via the SLOOH website The webcast of the eclipse will begin at around 17:15 Sri Lankan time.
Given the current weather in the evenings, I didn't expect to do much of stargazing. But imagine my surprise when I woke up around 3:30 AM to one of the clearest skies I've seen in Colombo.Did a bit of pointing, and decided to shoot Jupiter. One of the things that I shot way back when I was using my Astromaster ...
You can see a very bright star in the evening skies these days. Have a look at the western skies, just after the sunset, you will see a very bright star. It is so bright, that you can see it just after the sun sets and the skies are still blue.This is not actually a star. It's the planet Venus. ...
The very first constellation I learned to recognise was Orion. Perhaps it's fitting that the very first presentable deep space image I did was also related to it.The Orion Nebula (M42/NGC1976)The Orion Nebula is visible to the naked eye, but cannot see much details to fully appreciate the beauty of it. The nebula is essentially what makes up the second ...
About a week back, the NexStar 4SE that I ordered arrived. I've been quite eager to test it out in the field but however so far been unsuccessful due to bad weather. But the first impressions so far have been good. Here's a short review on the 4SE compared to the 114EQ.Out of the box:Everything was neatly packed in ...
This year is what probably you should call the Year of Astronomy. We are going to have three lunar eclipses, two solar eclipses (and one of them being a hybrid solar eclipse; an eclipse that appears as a total eclipse to some areas and an annular eclipse to other areas), three comets and Saturn at the closest to Earth. If ...
Probably about an year or so back, I tried to capture Saturn. It didn't work out well because there was a collimation error in the telescope; Saturn turned out like two saucers placed face to face.Last week, when I visited a national park, I decided to try it once more, this time with the Samyang 500mm Mirror Lens. This also ...
Today is the first day of the new year according to the traditions in Sri Lanka (or rather the traditions of Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka). I personally find the traditional new year in SL interesting as unlike many traditions around the world where the new year begins with a new day, it begins at a particular time of ...
Whenever I tell that I am interested in astronomy, there are some who come back with "Oh god! Don't tell me you don't believe in all that crap?". Sometimes I answer with a very serious "Well those are true!". The reality is that while there is a reasonable number of people who don't distinguish between astronomy and astrology, there is ...
Jupiter and Galilean Moons - From top to bottom: Europa, Io, Callisto and GanymedeI am not some one who is very sentimental, but I can't stop going back to the times that I was about 13-14 years old when I look at this picture.Back in around 1994-95 I constructed a telescope using nothing more than a lens of dad's old ...
While trying to find a possible location to spot the comet PANSTARRS (C/2011 L4), an interesting question came up. Would we actually get a better (and by better I mean practically better) chance of viewing if we were on a rooftop? Given that the comet is between 5-10 degrees above the Sun, there is only a small viewing window. How ...
I'm pretty sure quite a lot of us have seen moving stars. No these are not shooting stars, these are much slower and are reasonably bright. These are man-made satellites.Thanks to a tip-off from my dad (he's an avid reader of a local science magazine), I knew for a while that the International Space Station (ISS) is visible to naked ...
So yeah, managed to mend it DIY way, it does not look so great but well it still works.So here's what happened:I was trying to shoot Sirius around mid night and was dead tired. Was scrambling around half a sleep and toppled the telescope over. Had this been on grass, this would've been fine but it fell over and hit ...
Like my last post says, I went through an unfortunate incident of breaking the mount of my Celestron 114EQ. Thankfully I had the Samyang Mirror Lens to play with. Here is a photo of Jupiter made with the mirror lens:Jupiter - Stack of 10 images 1/80 shutter at 800ISO.Taken by Samyang 500mm f8.0 with a 2x converter.The photo is not ...
Well usually, you'd say it the other way around: Good news and bad news. But I have a lot more to say about the good news than the bad news.The bad news is that I toppled over the telescope and broke its mount. I still can't believe it, but yeah so that's how it went. I am thankful that the ...
Since any celestial photography is out due to the rains, I thought I might as well capture that.All photos were taken with a Canon 18-55mm (at 18mm) and a Canon 550D. The first photo has an exposure time of 15s and all others are with an exposure time of 30s. The photos have been post-processed for contrast and exposure.
