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 ...
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 ...
When I was processing the photo of the Magellanic Clouds, I noticed that four of the photos had a light trail going across it. As these are long exposure photos, a light trail means a travelling object. The light streak - Composite shot of 4x10s There are many types of illuminated travelling objects in the night sky. They can vary ...
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 ...
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 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. ...
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 ...
Supermoon was a term that turned up in various social media news items in the recent past. While obviously sparking an interest among the general public, it drew some criticism from prominent figures in astronomy like Neil deGrass Tyson (http://time.com/5046984/neil-degrasse-tyson-goes-on-epic-rant-about-tonights-supermoon-calls-it-an-embarrassment/) on how the term is a major exaggeration of reality.What does supermoon mean? The term supermoon has turned out ...
The entire last year has been a disaster on this blog. For the entire year I managed only one post and that too thanks to an accidental spotting. While I am determined to make at least one post per month this year, I am not entirely sure how the weather would work out.Thankfully, the year started with multiple events of ...
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 ...
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 - ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
On 26th December 2019, we witnessed an annular solar eclipse. Almost always, a solar eclipse doesn't come alone; it comes along with a lunar eclipse. And sure enough, nearly two weeks later, we have a penumbral lunar eclipse. Like the solar eclipse, this too is visible to Sri Lanka.In a penumbral lunar eclipse, the Moon goes through the penumbra, or ...
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, ...
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 ...
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
