[Dr_who]

Finally caught Comet Pan-Starrs through the clouds setting over the Mummy Range
Taken with K-5 and smc 200mm F4 lens
Hank

Very nice, I've been hoping for a break in the snowing and overcast weather here to no avail.

[Ex Finn.]

Finally caught Comet Pan-Starrs through the clouds setting over the Mummy Range
Taken with K-5 and smc 200mm F4 lens
Hank

Nice capture and nice and crispy air behind the clouds (jealous).

[Stone G.]

Nothing very special here. I am just celebrating that I finally had an almost clear sky throughout the night (between 15 and 16 March) - the first reasonably clear sky for ages.

Anyway, whenever I see the cresent Moon, I marvel how fabullously well the human eye can cope with high dynamic range situations. In a small scope, my eyes can easily capure 1 and 2 below together. With my camera, I have to take either one or the other:


1.: 1/20 sec; ISO 400; f/10; FL=900mm; 10 images stacked in Registax 5.1. Click to see larger version.


2.: 10 sec; ISO 400; f/10; FL=900mm; 10 images stacked in Registax 5.1. Click to see larger version.


3: 100% non-resized crop of image no. 1 above.

And finally: Jupiter will soon be lost in the glare of the evening Sun, but I managed to get a reasonable (with my means - everything is relative) shot of it this night:


4: 1/3 sec; ISO 400; f/50; EFL = 4500mm; stack of 17 images in Registax 5.1.
100% non-resized crop.

Images were taken with Pentax K-5 and a Bresser Messier AR90 900mm f/10 achromatic refractor. A 2.5X Apochromatic Barlow lens stacked with a Tamron SP F-Series 2X teleconverter were used for image no. 4.

[smigol]

Here are NGC 4567 and NGC 4568, an interacting pair of galaxies at about 60 million ly. They are both at about 11-12th magnitiude, pretty faint for my scope.

Taken with a 127mm Maksutov Cassegrain with my modified Pentax K10D camera. 23 subs of 1200 seconds at 100 ISO for a total of 7 hours of integration. Calibrated with Maxim with flats, bias, and clipped darks. I haven't had the chance to make a library of non-clipped darks yet. Processed in PI to stretch the histogram and run de-noising. There were some odd ringing artifacts that were introduced from the flats.




Big on flickr
Full size at Astrobin.

[VisualDarkness]

I finally hit the jackpot with the, extremely uncommon at this high intensity this south in Sweden, Aurora Borealis two days ago. It ws so amazing to see the sky glow, even with all the street lights around us.
My Sigma 20/1.8 was really good for this.

[Sagitta]

Niiice. I missed the show, somehow - I would of been out if I'd known. I was lucky in that my only (so far) aurora happened in August. I didn't even need to wear a jacket!

[GWARmachine]

Here is my photo of comet PanSTARRS. Zenitsuboyama, Yamaguchi Japan.

[oneeyedhawk]

Enjoy using old lens on new cameras. This is using an old spiralite f 6.3 fl 400mm lens iso 1600 at 3 sec. on my K5. Lens only cost $50 dollars at Goodwill.. Taken last night from Loveland Co A little motion blur due to 3 second exposure on a stationary tripod. Still shows the tail fan.
Hank

[Cannikin]

I don't really know much about image stacking, but I think it's very impressive what you can do with just a single RAW file and some work in Lightroom (mostly to try to reduce the prominence of the lens flare, and boost the contrast, both due to the very bright quarter moon). Taken in Mount Rainier National Park.

K-5, Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 @ 10mm f/4, ISO 1600, 30s:




K-5, Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 @ 17mm f/2.8, ISO 1600, 15s:

[zambonikane]

Here is a stratrail shot from the other night. This was taken from my back deck with my Kx and my Rokinon 8mm fish eye.

[smigol]

I haven't done a widefield shot in a long while and I went after this combined target last month.

Used a Pentax SMC TAKUMAR/6x7 1:4/200mm lens with adapter to fit the Pentax K10D camera. IDAS LPS P2 filter on the lens with a Baader Ha filter inside the adapter. I'd tried using just the LPS filter on the lens, but too much unfocused IR was ruining the image, leading to myriad red and orange rings around the stars. I used the second filter to limit the passed wavelength to just the Ha region, allowing tighter focus of the nebula and stars.

This is from a stack of six-1200 second subframes stacked using Pix Insight. I had to extract the red channel and reduce the size of the image by 50% to remove bayer artifacts.




In the end, I'm pleased with how it turned out. I learned a lot about how these lenses focus light and what wavelengths manage to get through the filters.

[cpho]

Hi everyone,
There are amazing pictures in this post.
I really want to now give astrophotography a try. But on a budget.

There's a penumbral lunar eclipse over Adelaide on the 26th April, so I really want to take a couple shots of the moon.

Would my current 18-135 do the job, or should I buy a longer lens?

Should the Sigma APO 70-300mm make a decent astrophotography lens?

[pixelsaurus]

Hi everyone,
There are amazing pictures in this post.
I really want to now give astrophotography a try. But on a budget.

There's a penumbral lunar eclipse over Adelaide on the 26th April, so I really want to take a couple shots of the moon.

Would my current 18-135 do the job, or should I buy a longer lens?

Should the Sigma APO 70-300mm make a decent astrophotography lens?

A quick and dirty rule for shooting the moon is to divide the focal length by 100. That will be the approximate size of the full moon in mm at the focal plane. Don't expect too much with a penumbral lunar eclipse; there is not usually any noticeable darkening of the lunar surface. Umbral eclipses are the ones that are easily discernible.

[Stone G.]

Gull to Thor Widefield by S Migol, on Flickr

Congratulations to smigol - your skills to squeeze out the weakest photons from the sky is amazing!

I don't have those skills but I do have my trusty, vintage Tamron Adaptall-2 200mm f/3.5 lens (Model 04B) and I do enjoy using it together with my Pentax O-GPS1/Astrotracer unit. Here's a recent example from last Sunday when my skies finally cleared and the Moon was waning:



Star Alkaid (Eta UMa) and the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). Uncropped stack in intersection mode in DSS of 10 images of 30 seconds
at ISO 3200. The original is 4600 pixels wide. Click on image to see a 1280 pixel wide version.

Of course, it is childish and utterly unscientific to produce a 3-400% enlargement of M51, but for me, astrophotograhy is also just a
question of having fun:


Approx. 300% crop of the above.

And now, I have the DA* 200mm f/2.8 underway in the post. I am excited to see, what that lens may produce........



Actual, 100% crop.

[k5astro]

What?! The GPS will track stars?! How does it do that? With the moveable sensor mount? I think I wasted $300 on a Vixen Polarie :-( I read the GPS can track for 5 mins. I seem to be only able to track for 2 mins with the polarie - with the basic setup.