08 Dec 2018. Circles of friends 👋 It’s not unusual for me to think of the stars as friends, or at least as familiar acquaintances. Orion has been a pattern in the sky that I’ve known since I was five years old, back in 1969, when an uncle pointed it out to me. I learned to recognise the other constellations and objects that I know in my early high school years when I was switched on to astronomy as a hobby. 🚙 When I arrive at a photography location in the dark of night, especially if it’s one I haven’t visited before, the first thing I do after getting out of my car is to look up and see where some familiar friends are positioned. Doing that helps to orientate me and to give me ideas for where to point my camera. If it’s circular star trails that I’m going to be imaging, for example, I find the Southern Cross and from that can work out where the South Celestial Pole is. Then it's a matter of making sure that you have an engaging foreground scene to use, plus enough coverage of the sky to capture some good-sized circles and then start shooting. That simple routine is one I followed on Friday night (07 December 2018) at the St David’s Anglican Church in Burrawang, a small rural town in my state of New South Wales, Australia. 📷 To create this circular-trails image I shot 329 individual photos over two-and-a-half hours. After importing the shots into my Mac and making some adjustments, I used the free software “StarStaX” to composite the frames into the final image. I used the same equipment & settings for each of the single frames, namely a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, a 25-second exposure @ ISO 800. To light the church’s exterior I used a small tripod-mounted LED bank that I'd fitted with a 3200K filter. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #startrails #burrawang #church
05 Dec 2018. Southern Hemisphere Showcase 🇦🇺 Featured on the flags of several countries in the Pacific region, the “Southern Cross” is a familiar shape in the evening skies of my Southern Hemisphere. The Cross is an asterism, a prominent pattern or group of stars that is smaller than a constellation. Part of the constellation Crux, the brightest star of the Cross is Alpha Crucis, located here at almost the dead-centre of the photo. The other stars in the Cross are not as bright as Alpha Crucis, but the mist that was present low in the sky when I took this image has diffused the light of two of them to make them look more prominent than they are. Immediately to the right of Alpha Crucis is the patch of sky known as the Coal Sack nebula, whose dark gas blocks out the light of the stars behind it. 🔭 At the bottom-right of the scene are two stars known as “The Pointers”, Alpha and Beta Centauri, in the constellation Centaurus. As you can see, a line drawn through them points to Gamma Crucis at the tip of the Southern Cross. The vibrant crimson colours over at the top left-hand corner of the photo give away the location of the Carina Nebula, named for its position in the constellation of Carina. Strewn across the top right-hand third of my picture are many streaks and wisps of dark interstellar gas, obscuring distant starlight in the same way as the Coal Sack nebula does. 🌫 The brown-orange colour of the lower half of the image is due to atmospheric airglow, with its colour and brightness amplified by the moist night air. 📷 The photo presented here is a composite that I created by shooting three overlapping images and combining or “stitching” them using some software. I shot each of those three photos using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera that was attached to an iOptron SkyTracker mount. The lens I used was a Canon 50mm f/1.8 model, set to f/4.0 (to reduce coma distortion), and I exposed each frame for 60 seconds at an ISO of 3200. • • • @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #ig #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday
03 Dec 2018. A comet for Christmas 📸 The green and fuzzy smudge below and to the left of the centre of my image for today is a comet. The photo is a little noisy and small since I shot it without the aid of a telescope of sky-tracker. The image is a simple, single-frame photo shot with a DSLR camera and a “nifty fifty” 50m prime lens, mounted on a static tripod. I photographed in this way to show that there are many beautiful objects in the night skies that one can shoot with the most basic of equipment. 💫 True to form for astronomers, the comet’s name is a technical splash of letters, “46P/Wirtanen”. At least planets have mythology-based names like “Mars”, “Jupiter”, “Saturn”, and the like. Comets are, more often than not, given an alphanumerical identifier plus the name of the discoverer(s) of the object. Maybe they should be given more exciting names like “Dumbledore”, “Drusilla” or even “Viper”. 🔭 46P/Wirtanen was discovered by the American astronomer Carl Wirtanen, in 1948, and is one of three comets that he identified for the first time. We’re fortunate to have our little green friend passing by the Earth once every 5.4 years; however its small size–a mere 1.2 km/0.75 mi in diameter–means that on most passes it has only been visible in telescopes, binoculars and also when imaged in photographs. 46P’s close approach on December 16, 2018, though, may well be naked-eye visible. There are lots of websites where you can look for viewing information for this near-Christmas visitor. 📷 As I mentioned above, this is a single-frame photo that I shot without a telescope or sky-tracker. I captured the image with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Canon 50mm lens @ f/2.2, exposed for 6 seconds @ ISO 6400.
02 Dec 2018. Same place, different season 📆 Here in Australia, we recognise our seasons as commencing on the first day of a calendar quarter. Winter begins on the first day of June. Spring, the first of September. With today being the second of December, we’ve already had one full day of summer pass by. That means it is six months since I was shivering through a winter night, shooting nightscape images using these silos in the foreground. It certainly doesn’t feel like it was that long ago! 🌟💫 With the Milky Way’s galactic core now lost in the brightness of the evening twilight–Milky Way season is over–you will likely see more posts from me and other nightscape photographers featuring star-trails and deep-sky objects. ⏰🌫 I had planned to shoot at least two hours worth of star-trails at the silos last night, but a very thick fog floated in and put an end to that. The trails I did get were long enough to make a good image from, and I even achieved a result I’d set out to get, which was some trails showing between the silos and through the holes in the perishing roof. There is a fog-piercing light a few hundred metres along the road from the silos, and it provided an eerie glow to back-light the scene. 📷 To create this final image I shot 123 single-frame photos in 55 minutes. I captured each of those frames with a Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 800. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #startrails #silos #nowra
29 Nov 2018. Sometime late ⏰ 📆 Seeing the Milky Way’s central band low in the southwestern sky, as it appears in this photo, means that it’s late. It could be late in the calendar year and but not very late at night, as it was when I took this photo at around 10:00 pm in early October. The other extreme is that the time could be at a late hour, not long before dawn, but in the month of June. Of course, it could also be somewhere between those times of year. 🌌 The other “late” thing about this image is the departed who are at rest in the cemetery of the churchyard at St Stephen’s Church near Goulburn, Australia. I have only ever been to this site at night, but hope to visit it during daylight some time in 2019, to read inscriptions on the headstones and take in the history of the locale. 📷 I shot this single-frame image with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, using a 25-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams #goulburn #church
26 Nov 2018. The heavens at halfway 📆 Not quite halfway, but it was only a week after the midpoint of 2018 when I was out in the cold of an Aussie winter night, capturing the photos that I used to create this vertical panoramic image. Located near the rural city of Lismore in New South Wales, Australia, this old and former church building is blessed with dark skies on a moonless night. The lack of light pollution, as well as the dry and clear air on that evening, provided excellent conditions for revealing the wispy dust lanes and dark nebulae that characterise the core region of our Milky Way galaxy. 🌌🌟💫 As with so many of my photos from this year, Mars is a dominant player in the scene, looking big, bright and orange over at the top-left of the frame. The Large Magellanic Cloud is peeking out from the bottom edge of the church’s roof on the left, with its sibling the Small Magellanic Cloud making a more conspicuous appearance over the tree near the lower corner of the frame. The short tail of a meteor forms a triangle with Mars and the Small Cloud. For all of the interest that these celestial objects give to the scene, it’s our majestic, magic and magnificent Milky Way that my eyes go straight to, every time I look at this photo. 📷 As I mentioned above, this is a vertical panorama which I composited from ten single, overlapping images. For each of those individual frames I used a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.4, and a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. I had the camera mounted on a Nodal Ninja III panoramic head, tipped at 90 degrees to allow for the vertical orientation. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams #lismore #church
25 Nov 2018. Skies wide open 🚙 Six weeks ago I did one of my epic one-night drives to get out and shoot photos of the Milky Way. It’s crazy, I know, but I covered nearly 500km (310 mi) on that night. My first stop of three was at this 19th-century church and its accompanying graveyard near Crookwell, Australia. I have posted a few photos from here in my timeline previously. A couple of those were small stitched panoramic images, but this one is a section of a monster 65-image panorama that ended up saving out as a 1.8GB file! 🌌 I know there’s a lot of empty sky in the photo, but I cropped it that way so I could include Mars up at the top-right of the scene. You can see the Magellanic Clouds and the globular cluster 47 Tucanae shining clearly on the left. 47 Tucanae is hovering a little to the top-right of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Milky Way and its galactic core were low in the western sky, and there is a visible glow extending up towards Mars, indicating the presence of the Zodiacal Light. 📷 To create the full-size panorama that this photo was taken from, I captured 65 single images, each of which was shot with a Canon EOS 6D camera, using a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams #photographerfocus
20 Nov 2018. Orion’s colours ⏱ [SWIPE TO SEE MORE] I’ve left myself short of time tonight to write up one of my usual creative-but-technical descriptions. Here’s the constellation of Orion (most of it, at least) shot recently using a tracking mount to enable a longer exposure, capturing more of the colours and details visible in this beautiful sign in the sky. A very fine layer of fog caused the size and colours of the brighter stars to be accentuated, making them more visible than they would be in a shot taken under drier skies. 📷 The camera that I used for this was a Canon EOS 6D Mk II, with a Canon 50mm lens @ f/3.5, using a 60-second exposure @ ISO 3200. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #orion #betelgeuse #rigel #m42
18 Nov 2018. So many things to see 📆 Even though I still have a good backlog of Milky Way photos that I shot this year, during the months from November until February I’ll likely be posting more images of other night-sky wonders. Today, for example, I’d like to show you a few after-dark features of the Southern Hemisphere’s heavens. I didn’t use a telescope for capturing these images; only a digital camera mounted on a tracking mount. ☀️ At the left is the beautiful star Canopus, the second-brightest star visible at night from anywhere on Earth. Its name is generally considered to originate from the mythological Canopus, who was a navigator for Menelaus, king of Sparta. 🌌 Near the centre is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that, along with its smaller sibling the Small Magellanic Cloud (at right), is travelling through space as a companion to our own, the Milky Way. In the two inset circles, I have highlighted some “deep sky” objects of interest. The first is the Tarantula Nebula, a “diffuse nebula” that was first seen through a telescope in 1751. You can’t make out much detail in my slight-fuzzy photo of it, but if you take a look at the object's Wikipedia article, you’ll be rewarded with many beautiful images. ✨ The second callout centres on the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, known for short as “47 Tuc”. You can spot this object without binoculars or a telescope, provided, of course, that you’re in a part of our planet that can see the Small Magellanic Cloud. 📷 I shot three overlapping photos to create this final panel containing all of the objects. For each of those three shots, I had my camera mounted on an iOptron SkyTracker mount, which enabled me to use an exposure time of 120 seconds. There’s a slight “streaking” visible in the close-up sections, due to my lack of skill with aligning the tracker. The camera I used was a Canon EOS 6D Mk II model with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens set to f/2.8 and an ISO setting of 800. • • • • • @space @universe247 #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio
15 Nov 2018. Relics 😱🌌 I hope to be able to find out something of the history of this rural relic, located on a dirt road near Goulburn, Australia. My first visit here was in late November 2016, and I had no idea if it was still standing as I made my way to the spot last Saturday, November 10th. Arriving to find it intact was a relief, as this was my last chance in 2018 to photograph the Milky Way’s core region. Looking back I think I’ve had a very productive and satisfying Milky Way photography season this year and this was a great location to finish that season off with. 🌒 Even though only a thin crescent, the waning moon was still bright enough to obscure some of the stars from my camera’s sight, leaving me a relic of the Milky Way to capture. Ideally, I would have been here on Friday night, when the moon would have already set and given me much better Milky Way viewing. No way was that going to happen, though, as I didn’t want to miss my son’s end-of-year musical performance at his university. 📷 To make the most of my visit I shot a 350-frame time-lapse video of the Milky Way setting, the star-trails compilation that I posted earlier in the week from 155 photos, named “Round ’n’ round over the ruins”, plus several single-frame images. In total, I shot 600 images on the night. This photo is a single-frame image that I captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using a 15-second exposure @ ISO 3200. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams #goulburn
13 Nov 2018. Orion in the East 🧭 Today's photo shows how the constellation of Orion looks as it rises in the east down here in the Southern Hemisphere. Even on your phone’s screen, you should be able to make out the hazy purplish area that is the Orion Nebula, also known as M42. It’s about 1/4 down from the top edge of my shot and a little left of the centreline. The nebula is visible with the naked eye in dark skies, and even in some areas with a moderate amount of light pollution. With a diameter of around 24 light-years, this beautiful object has been observed to be a star-forming region, and at 1340-odd light-years from Earth, it is the closest such “stellar nursery” yet seen. ☀️✨🌟 Further left and just below halfway down the frame you can see the orange “supergiant” star Betelgeuse. Why the designation of “supergiant”? Based on astronomical observations, Betelgeuse is so massive that if it was placed in the centre of our Solar System, its outer surface would be found near Jupiter. Yeah, that's big! 💡 The red lights marking the locations of wind turbines add some extra colour to the photo. Although I could have cloned out the black streaks of the powerlines that follow the nearby roadway, I opted to leave them in because they were there on the night. 📷 This photo is a single-frame image that I shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, through a Canon 40mm lens @ f/2.8, using a 10-second shutter speed @ ISO 12,800. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #orion #nebula #windfarm #renewables
12 Nov 2018. Beyond the gate. Give or take 2.5 million light-years. 🌌 It’s likely that I’ve mentioned in other posts that I love being able to photograph the Andromeda Galaxy, aka the Andromeda Nebula, or M31. In the late 1970s, in my high school days, I fell in love with astronomy and so spent plenty of time in my school’s library, poring over the few astronomy books they had on the shelves. One of the most enthralling objects appearing in the photographic books’ photographic plates was the Andromeda Galaxy. These were long-exposure images of this body of around one trillion stars, about 2.5 million light-years from Earth, captured by some of the largest and most legendary telescopes of the 20th century. 📷 Even though M31 is best seen much further north than my latitude of 34 degrees below the equator, it’s still possible to photograph this little glowing fuzzy blob low over the northern horizon. 🧭 However, I didn’t use a telescope–big or small–to get this photo. This image is a single-frame photo, captured with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Canon 40mm lens @ f/2.8, and a 10-second exposure @ ISO 12800. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #galaxy #andromeda #m31
11 Nov 2018. Round ’n’ round over the ruins 🌏 The turning of our earth on its axis–its diurnal rotation, as astronomers call it–is what causes the sun and moon to seem to rise and set each day. This daily movement of our planet has the same effect on how we see the stars. They appear to move across the sky as the night passes. Some of these celestial hosts, called “circumpolar stars”, never disappear behind the horizon, and so appear to scribe complete circles across the heavens. ✨ To show this movement I set up my camera on a tripod and connected an interval timer, aka an “intervalometer”, so that the camera would take a 25-second long exposure, then pause for one second, then take another shot. Rinse and repeat! Over one hour and ten minutes, my camera shot off 155 frames, which I then combined using some free software (called StarStax) to create a single image that conveys the feeling that the stars have moved in circles on the sky. 📷 I took the 155 single frames using a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, with each frame exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 1600. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #startrails #startrailsphotography #startrailchasers
10 Nov 2018. West of winter 👋🌌 We Southern Hemisphere folk farewelled winter last month and have already felt the heat of summer, even before spring is halfway through. Saying goodbye to winter also means bidding adieu to the Milky Way’s gorgeous galactic core. The core is very close to the western horizon here in my photo, shot last Thursday night. 🛰🛰 Shining up from near the galactic centre towards the orange glow of the planet Mars (top right), the Zodiacal Light was very visible to the unaided eye. To the left of Mars are the trails of a pair of satellites in orbit. Warning lights atop wind turbines on the next ridge account for the red dots near the tree. 📷 I captured this single-frame photo using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/4.0, an exposure time of 30 seconds @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams
06 Nov 2018. When even the darkness isn’t dark anymore 🛰💫 Before you lose interest in reading another of my long blurbs, I’d like to point you to the International Space Station, which was passing over these fields & hills near Crookwell, Australia, when I shot this photo last Sunday night (4th Nov). You can see its trail on the right of the scene, looking like a meteor burning up. 💡✨ Despite this being a rural location, the once-dark skies here are cursed with lots of light pollution. The red dots on the left are aircraft warning lights atop the many wind turbines dotted along the ridges. There’s a bright, white light bloom on the horizon, about 1/3 in from the left, indicating where the nearby city of Goulburn lies. The unmissable yellow blast on the right is the lights of Australia’s national capital, Canberra, reflecting off clouds. Canberra is 100 km (60 mi) distant from where I took the photo. The two large, hazy blobs of light that I captured near the centre of my photo are the Magellanic Clouds galaxies, and they’re flanked by the stars Canopus (to the lower left of the Large Magellanic Cloud) and Achernar (to the upper left of the Small Magellanic Cloud.
📷 I shot this single-frame image with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, Samyang 14mm @ f/2.8, for a 30-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #nasa #iss #internationalspacestation #magellanicclouds
01 Nov 2018. A photo from September to remember in November 📆 How is it already November? I swear somebody stole a couple of months out of my year. My image for this initial day of the month is one I shot in early September, during a three-night stay at my family’s holiday shack on the south coast of my state of New South Wales, Australia. The first night yielded no photos, with persistent cloud-cover blocking out the wonders above. The Saturday and Sunday nights, though, were very productive and had me out harnessing the heavenly lights for many hours. 🌌 🌲 I had visited this location, near the dairy town of Bodalla, several times over the past four years and I’d noticed these dead trees still reaching skywards while I was photographing other foregrounds. This time, I made a point of including the lifeless limbs in several photos. The yellow wire across the track wasn’t visible in the dark, but I somehow managed to avoid tripping over it during my fumbling footfalls. The bright white object near the horizon is the planet Jupiter, still surrounded by some Zodiacal Light. 📷 This image is a single-frame photo that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams #trees #bodalla @eurobodalla
30 Oct 2018. Always on the move 🌟✨ So many stars! The northeastern sky at Coila Lake, Australia, was full of stars, and the still waters of the lake provided a useful mirror to reflect them in when I shot this scene at 4:15 am one morning early in September of 2018. Yes, that was an early hour to be up and out taking photos, but it was the tail-end of a photography outing that had started at 11:00 pm the previous night. The picture includes the sky’s brightest star, Sirius, at the top right, and the constellation of Orion to the left of that, in the centre of the frame. Not far above the horizon at the extreme left is the orange glow of the star Capella, with its light reflecting as a streak on the lake’s surface. Below that you can see the horrible glow from yellow anti-fog lights at the Moruya Airport, 16 km (10 mi) to the north. 🌞 🌏 If I had waited one month I would have only had to stay up until 2:15 am to photograph these sky features. Wait another month, and I could pack up and go to bed at 12:15 am. Do you see the pattern in the times I’ve noted? There’s a two-hour difference from month-to-month. The combination of the Earth’s daily rotation on its axis and our journey around the Sun result in the stars appearing to move across the night sky from hour-to-hour and to show up in a slightly different part of the sky at the same time each day. The water in the lake was moving a little, stretching out some of the reflections to make the stars look like streaks rather than dots, adding to all of the movement. 📷 The photo is a stitched image, created from seven individual frames that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D, Rokinon 24mm @ f/2.4, with a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #orion #reflection
29 Oct 2018. Luminous Maximus 💡 To say that there are a few sources of light in this photo is an understatement. I can name at least eight of them for starters. The first one that got my attention when I looked at the finished picture tonight was the atmospheric phenomenon known as “airglow”, which is providing the green background colour to the sky. Next are the thousands of individual stars that look like salt or fine glitter has been sprinkled across the scene. Thirdly, we have the legendary planet Mars, with its orange glow looming in the upper centre of the frame. The sand on the foreground shore was lit up by some LED banks that I mounted on small tripods behind the camera’s field of view. 🌌 This night was the first time that I had ever photographed the blue glow of bioluminescent organisms in the water here at Tuross Lake, Australia. It’s visible at the waterline on the lower left. Distinct from the individual stars in the photo, the galactic core of the Milky Way, with its billions of suns all glowing together, is giving off a yellowish tone in the sky above the bioluminescence. OK, that’s six sources of light. Number seven is the white glow of lights at the Tuross Lakeside Caravan Park, in the distance on the right. Left of that you can see the headlights of a car driving in towards the town, with the deep yellow glow of some sodium fog-piercing lights marking the junction of the haven's only access road and the Princes Highway. Oh, I found a ninth one, although it’s hard to see if you're looking at this on your phone. It’s the green navigation light atop a marker buoy on the far side of the lake. 📷 It was very, very satisfying to see how well this photo came out after shooting the 18 frames that make it up, then running it through my panorama-stitching software before some de-noising and levels adjustments in Lightroom and Photoshop. The file ended up taking up nearly 800MB of hard disk space. I shot each of the 18 individual frames with my Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.4, using a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400.
28 Oct 2018. No camping? 🏕 This sign has to be one of the worst-placed signs I’ve ever seen. If you’re going to get out and camp under the stars, wouldn’t you want to do it somewhere like this, at the Yalwal Dam, Australia? There is a camping area down the hill, not far from this sign, but it doesn’t have as a clear a view of the sky as the hilltop does. Sometimes life isn’t fair! 🌟 ✨ This vertical panorama has quite a few favourite astronomical features in it. At the lower left, only just over the tree line, there’s a crimson area of stars that is the Eta Carinae nebula. Up to the right of that is the Coal Sack nebula, showing as a small dark mark on the bright starry background. The Southern Cross is immediately under the lower-right corner of the Coal Sack, with Alpha & Beta Centauri, aka “The Pointers”, up to the right. Our solar system’s most massive planet, Jupiter, is almost out of frame on the right, being kept company by the bright star Zubenelgenubi, in the constellation of Libra. Shining in its beautiful orange glory at the top and centre of my photo is Mars, which had passed its closest point to earth a couple of weeks before I captured it in this scene. 🌌 Of course, the edge-on view that we have of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, totally dominates the photo, looking like a vast diagonal streak of light and dark stains against the starry sky. 📷 I shot nine overlapping frames to create this vertical panorama but only ended up needing seven of those to capture all of the features that I wanted to include. For each of those seven photos, I used the following settings: a Canon EOS 6D digital SLR camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens set @ f/2.4, a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400. • • • • • @astro_photography_ @space @universe247 @photographerfocus #astro_photography_ #astronomy #astrophotography #canon #darkskyshots #earth_tag #ig_astrophotography #nightimages #nightphotography #nightscape #nightscapeoz #nightscaper #nightshooters #space #stargazing #startalkradio #timelessuniverse #universe #universetoday #WeOwnTheNight_IG #milkyway #galaxy #WOTN_MilkyWay #MilkyWayChasers #MilkyWayGrams #nowra