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Forum: Post Your Photos!
01-20-2024, 11:53 AM
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
01-17-2024, 02:36 PM
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
09-28-2022, 07:33 PM
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Here is my latest. First attempt at a mosaic. M45 the Pleiades/7 Sisters/Subaru star cluster.
 M45Mosaic by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
08-16-2022, 08:10 AM
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Moses Falls near Revelstoke BC on our way back from a small family holiday to Royal Tyrell Museum.
10 images of 1/4s exposures stacked.
 Moses by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-23-2023, 07:55 PM
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The last crystal I photographed this season. Decided to go with it because we're on the topic of split stars, from the X-mas crystal. This is a good example of a split star, the left 3 arms are on top of the right three arms. telltale sign is the overlapping V in the middle plus the arms on the left have the details on the underside with a very thin film of ice on the side facing the camera. The reversed details is the biggest telltale sign of a split star. To the naked eye, split stars can look a little fuzzy on one side and clear on the other. In this case, the split arms are either on a very very short column, or my suspicion is that they're just overlapped. If there were a column, the diamond would look a tad different.
 P-118-0C-94-2023-Snowflake014 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-07-2023, 07:35 PM
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No more snow yet. Just mud, dead brown plants and grey skies. Tried to break it up a bit with some closeup with the 31mm ltd.
 DeadFlowerFall2023-2 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-03-2023, 07:48 PM
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
11-16-2023, 11:22 AM
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First frost of the image, exercising the muscles needed to photograph snowflakes.
They're blue because of my blue coat.
 FrostNov2023 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
11-04-2023, 06:46 PM
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Found these RAW files stuffed away in an obscure backup location while I was searching for some other images the other day. Was excited because I was wanting to try and rework it. Image was taken in 2016 and the original edit was fairly weak. I just wasn't experienced enough in keeping a warm sunrise glow on distant mountains through haze.
Hope you enjoy!
 DTRPano by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
11-04-2023, 08:50 PM
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
06-26-2023, 01:39 PM
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My first Milky Way with the Pentax 31mm ltd. lens. I used a Skyguider pro for this shot. We had hoped for more blooms and didn't anticipate the amount of light pollution that would be here. Also it was clear for 5 hours, then right when we needed to shoot the core, small puffy clouds were forming directly overhead and drifted south right in front of the band of stars. Just our luck.
 BalsamMW by Greg Murray, on Flickr
I also did a test of it's performance on stars with built in astrotracer a while before this shoot. It was a quick test to look at things like coma and chromatic aberrations. At full open, for stars, the lens is fairly useless especially if using the built in astrotracer and the field rotation it suffers from. This turns the coma into some kind of awful aberration with this lens. It's best to shoot at f3.2 if you're going to use the 31mm ltd for astro. And yes, before people get on the case that 'astrotracer doesn't induce field rotation'... it does. I've documented it's affects very well. It happens with every lens I own and yet, while using the same settings and lenses, it doesn't happen at all on a proper tracking mount.
 31mmComparison by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
04-14-2023, 09:20 PM
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Just did a test of my new FA 31mm Ltd lens. It only arrived this afternoon so I took my daughter out for sunset to test the lens and get a feel for it's field of view in this location; I may do a milky way shoot here with it.
This has been a dream lens and can't wait to really dive into it after I test it out on some things.
I missed a focus slice with this test shot though, so don't be too critical on it.
4 images focus merged, needed 1 more.
 Niskonlith 31mm test by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-22-2023, 06:29 PM
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The christmas snowflake. I took this image on Christmas Eve. Very rare find to have the X design. What likely happened here was the crystal formed as a split star. That is, the arms grow on two or more layers, separated from each other by a column. In this case, it was likely a two tiered crystal where the 2 missing arms grew on the other end of the column. Split stars can grow in any combination: 5 arms one one, 1 on the other, 2/4, 3/3. In this case the arm containing the other two branches broke off somewhere in the cloud leaving behind the X. It was quite windy this day so collisions would have been frequent. A rare form, I've been doing this since 2013 and have only ever found this one. Sometimes an X can form from two crossed needles, but it is rare to find an X with the arms fleshed out, and even more rare it happened on X-Mas eve.
 P-118-n13C-74-2023-Snowflake011 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-21-2023, 07:00 PM
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Here is snowflake number 013 from this season. It was taken just before my last post and I knew the next crystals I would find would have even more rime on them. This crystal is when the quality had started to change. Not shot with pixel shift resolution and it is a bit softer but still sharper than last years and the beginning of this season.
 P-118-0C-94-2023-Snowflake013 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-18-2023, 07:01 PM
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One of the crystals I caught this year. I was doing tests with my cheap microscope objectives because I wasn't quite happy with how sharp the images were. Despite being in focus, they always seemed soft. While I should probably invest in optics that cost more than $20 US, I was indeed using these objectives incorrectly. I've now got the spacing down better. And, if I am able to shoot pixel shift resolution like this image here, the clarity and sharpness increase significantly. This year has been a little meh for snow. The crystals I have photographed have been fairly decent, but there just hasn't been very much. For this particular session, this crystal was one of the last ones. They quickly changed from nice large detailed crystals to crystals with heavy rime, which is what we see here.
 P-118-0c-94-2023-Snowflake012-PSR by Greg Murray, on Flickr
 P-118-0c-94-2023-Snowflake012-PSR-Crop by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-17-2023, 06:10 PM
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I have a photo dump coming these next few days. I've been lax in uploading to flicker this winter and thus, haven't posted anything new since the Pleiades image from September.
Here is my latest, comet C/2022 E3
I learned a crap tonne about comet photography and processing with this image. It's NOT for the faint of heart, especially at long focal lengths. But still got an ok image. It's 2.5 hours of 90s exposures combined with 1 hour of 45s exposures for the starfield.
Enjoy!
 C_2022_E3_V3Done by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-29-2022, 09:13 PM
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ooof, this was a long time ago. I no longer have this telescope but it was shot with a William Optics Z71 ED doublet at around 333mm with the flattener/reducer. In fact, what you see here is not tracking errors but a rookie mistake when i changed the distance my field flattener was to the camera. This was under corrected, or in other words my field flattener was too close to the sensor. Not only did I make that wrong assumption, but when I went to adjust my mount, I screwed up, got confused and instead of tightening one set screw while loosening the other, I was tightening both. This caused too much force to be applied to the worm gear housing and the housing snapped, sending the mount in a free spin which ripped the electronic cables from the main PCB. I had to order a replacement worm housing from Skywathcer who had to have it manufactured in China at the very start of the pandemic. It took 6 months for the replacement to come in. In that time I fixed the electronics, sold the Z71 ED and bought an RC6 telescope, guide scope and guide camera. I am much happier with this current setup than the one I used for this image so in the end, it did all work out, but it took a long time.
---------- Post added 12-29-2022 at 08:25 PM ----------
Here is a comparison from last years M42 attempt, shot with the RC6 at 1370mm instead. This is only 45 minutes of data before I got clouded over. I love my RC telescope, it has it's minor issues but overall it beats the pants off of less expensive refractors like the Z71. The Z71 with Field flattener would have cost around $900 CAD new at the time.
 OrionPIv6 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
02-21-2020, 11:29 AM
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Was able to go out the other evening even just for a short time. 27x 1 minute exposures, 20 Bias frames. pre-processed, calibrated and stacked in SiriL. Stretched in FitsLiberator3 then the RGB channels recombined in Affinity Photo.
I was having tracking errors. I need to re-tune my mount today. It sounded a bit rough while slewing during star align and I knew I'd have errors despite good polar alignment.
 M42v1 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
12-09-2022, 09:14 AM
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Not sure how I always miss the competitions until the last minute. I check the forum weekly and follow the FB page. Oh well, caught it in the nick of time. A 31ltd is a dream lens for me and one that I'll likely never be able to afford. I almost purchased a used one this year that had a 'crunchy' focus mechanism, but I just couldn't bring myself to invest in it when it potentially may not focus properly, and it was still slightly out of reach in price.
I've maybe shared this one before, but here it is as my entry. Moses Falls near Revelstoke BC. Taken on the Pentax smc-DA 14mm and my K3II.
It's a stack of 10x ISO 100, f/20, 1/4s exposures edited in LR and stacked in Affinity Photo.
Enjoy
Moses by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
01-17-2020, 06:47 AM
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Here is number 008. I did end up taking another 009, but I am saving that one to publish later; only a select few have seen it. Wanting to enter it into an upcoming competition. Originally I wanted to enter this one because it was the best one I got so far this year, but not any longer.
 Snowflake008 by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
08-17-2022, 08:56 AM
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Here is a test of the old 50mm f1.7 M lens stopped down to I think f/2.8? Not sure, it's two clicks slower than 1.7 I've never been any good doing that math in my head.
It's only a test because this is only 5 - 60s exposures of the core region of the Milky Way taken with the iOptron Skyguider pro.
Which brings me to another point: I've turned this Skyguider Pro into something rather fun. I'm calling it The Travelling Skyguider, where people can apply and have the unit shipped to them to use for 4 months before it is shipped to another person. The aim is for anyone wanting to learn astrophotgoraphy and may not have the means to buy a tracker or experience/gumption to dive head first into astrophotography with a full imaging setup right off the bat.
Currently open to North American applicants only, because I am broke and can't afford to ship it all over the world.
If you're curious, send me a message or if you know of someone, tell them to email thetravellingskyguider@gmail.com and I will send them the documents and application details.
Can also find it on Instagram @thetravellingskyguider
 50mm by Greg Murray, on Flickr
 The Travelling Skyguider by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
08-16-2022, 08:00 AM
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Well done! Nice lighting, well framed, beauty model.
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
08-14-2022, 06:17 PM
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That's a huge undertaking to expand on at the moment for me. Look up Astrophotography star trackers for milky way and there are a lot of articles on it. For stacking the tracked star shots I use PixInsight.
The reflection was difficult because while star reflections were sharp in the longer tracked exposures, stacking to help reduce noise and bring out detail didn't work. Obviously the untracked 4 minute exposures had a lot of trailing in them. The reflections of the stars were glorious on the perfectly still water. If I had done the work to capture them properly, I wouldn't have had such a hard time and the image would be a better rendition of what the camera saw.
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
08-13-2022, 08:05 AM
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Suppose I should post a bit more here... Here is my latest milky way image. the stars are a stack of 30x 60s exposures. FOreground is a stack and focus merge of 6 4minute exposures all at ISO 400. Reflection was a pain to add back in because I didn't shoot it separately from the other two sets, foolishly.
 July2022MilkyISS by Greg Murray, on Flickr
 July2022Milky by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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Forum: Post Your Photos!
03-11-2022, 04:57 PM
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I got Starnet++ working on my M1 Mac so here is a better edit of my M45 shot from Oct 31, done in PixInsight and Affinity Photo
 M45piV5tiff by Greg Murray, on Flickr
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