Alan Dyer – Page 4 – The Amazing Sky

October 26, 2013

Sailing in the Wake of Columbus

Columbus set out from the Canary Islands, following the stars, in his voyages across the Atlantic Ocean.

Today we visited the Casa de Colon, the Columbus Museum, in the capital city of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. It was here, in what was then the Governor’s house, that Columbus is believed to have stayed before embarking on many of his voyages across the Atlantic.

Above is the painted ceiling in one of the galleries, depicting the northern constellations and stars he would have followed to guide him across the Atlantic. You can recognize all the modern constellations and the Milky Way.

Tonight, we set sail ourselves across the Atlantic, in a two week voyage away from land. Our ship, the Star Flyer, chartered by Betchart Expeditions, has a mix of square and staysails that we’ll use, as Columbus did, to catch the trade winds that will blow us south and west toward the eclipse intercept point and eventually to Barbados.

This is an authentic astrolabe from 1500, one of the tools Columbus would have used to navigate the high seas. Today we have GPS.

This is the church Columbus prayed at before embarking on his voyages. It was closed the day we visited. We hope we won’t be needing its services!

October 24, 2013October 24, 2013

Visiting the Royal Observatory of Spain

Three days ago we were accorded the rare privilege of touring the Royal Observatory of Spain in Cadiz.

Founded in the late 18th century Spain’s Royal Observatory served (and continues to serve) the same purpose as the Greenwich Observatory in England – providing an accurate source of time for the navy and country.

Unlike Greenwich, the Royal Observatory of Spain is on a restricted access military base and is not open to the public. So it was through special arrangement that our eclipse group was able to visit and receive a guided tour as part of our day in Cadiz.

Above is the main observatory building, which today houses a telescope and laser range finding system for geodesy work. On display were a host of brass telescopes and surveying instruments from the 18th and 19th centuries.

$Astrographic Refractor, Royal Observatory of Spain, Cadiz$

Above, in another observatory building, we saw a classic 12-inch astrographic refractor, used to take early photos of the night sky on glass plates, as part of the international Cartes du Ciel program in the 19th century.

This is the readout of the precise time, being maintained by cesium clocks in a climate controlled room next door.

The real treat was a tour through the Observatory’s library, a national treasure. Some 40,000 volumes date from as far back as the invention of the printing press in Gutenberg. The collection includes books on every science and engineering subject, and reports from all the historic science expeditions of the time.

One volume, shown here, is a 1514 book of eclipse tables.

Another case held early editions, often annotated by their owners, of the seminal works by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. We were very impressed.

Tomorrow our cruise ship docks at the Canary Islands, then we sail southwest with the trade winds to meet the shadow of the Moon on November 3 at latitude 18°06′ N and 39°19′ W.

October 21, 2013

Stars Over the Pillars of Hercules

In ancient times these twin mountains marked the end of the known world – beyond lay a great unknown sea.

Two mornings ago, before dawn, we sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar, known in ancient times as the Pillars of Hercules. The two massive peaks guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean Ocean were supposedly created by the legendary figure of Greek mythology to separate the two continents, Europe and Africa. Beyond them was a vast and forbidding ocean that few dared to sail.

The feature image above shows Sirius and Canis Major shining above the African side of the Pillars, the mountain known as Jebel Musa. Illumination is by moonlight, twilight and streetlight.

The image above shows the more famous Rock of Gibraltar, on the European side of the Straits. This is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

This image, with the nearly Full Moon in the sky, shows our ship, the Star Flyer, approaching Jebel Musa. We departed the Mediterranean to visit Morocco, then Cadiz in Spain. We’re now heading out into the once great unknown sea, the Atlantic, for a November 3 meeting with the shadow of the Moon.

The final image shows Orion, Sirius and Jupiter shining amid the rigging of our four-masted clipper ship, again by moonlight. We hope it’s clear skies and smooth sailing as we cross the Atlantic.

October 18, 2013

The Subtle Shading of a Penumbral Lunar Eclipse

This is about as subtle as an eclipse can be – a partial penumbral eclipse of the Moon.

I was perfectly positioned to see this eclipse, such as it was. At mid-eclipse when I took this image, the Moon was due south and as high in the sky as it was going to get for the night.

My location was the hotel poolside bar and rooftop patio 10 floors up overlooking the harbour in Malaga, Spain.

Can you see the effect of the eclipse? Barely, perhaps. The Full Moon travelled through the top of the Earth’s penumbral shadow, creating a slight darkening of the lower portion of the Moon. I’ve boosted contrast a lot in processing yet the effect is still barely perceptible.

No matter. With luck, in two weeks time we’ll experience just the opposite – the most spectacular eclipse the sky has to offer, a total eclipse of the Sun.

We set sail tomorrow.

October 18, 2013October 18, 2013

Moon Over Malaga – Two Weeks Until the Eclipse

Moon Over Malaga, Spain.

On the night of a penumbral eclipse, the Full Moon shines over the harbour on the Mediterranean at Malaga, Spain.

This was the view earlier tonight of the Full Moon from Spain, on the night of a partial penumbral eclipse.

The eclipse had not yet begun when I took this shot in the early evening. But even at mid eclipse at 1 a.m. local time, any darkening from the penumbral shadow would be very tough to photograph with anything but a very long telephoto or telescope, which I don’t have with me on this trip.

The penumbral eclipse of the Moon tonight is the complement of the total eclipse of the Sun in two weeks time. Lunar and solar eclipses usually occur in pairs. It is the total solar eclipse on November 3, half a lunar cycle from now, that is the attraction.

To see it, we leave Spain tomorrow and set sail across the Atlantic – not in this century-old German sailing ship, the Eye of the Wind – but in a modern ship the Star Flyer.

October 16, 2013

The Moon in Spain …

… shines mainly on the plane!

These were views seen from my airplane window earlier this evening as we descended into Madrid, Spain. The lighting, direction and timing were perfect for catching the crystal clear gibbous Moon shining in a beautifully clear sky (as it should be from this altitude) with a low Sun illuminating the clouds.

The view below, taken later after sunset, catches the Moon in a twilight sky, with the shadow of the Earth sharply defined as a dark blue band above the horizon.

In two days, on Friday October 18, the Moon passes through the outer part of Earth’s shadow, for a mild penumbral eclipse of the Moon.

I’ll be perfectly positioned in Spain to see it, but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m off to chase not the shadow of the Earth but the shadow of the Moon, as it hits the Earth two weeks after the lunar eclipse. On November 3 worlds will align again for a total eclipse of the Sun across the Atlantic Ocean and central Africa. I’ll be on the ocean.

Internet connections willing, I’ll be blogging from shipboard about the eclipse and views of sea and sky as we cross the Atlantic from Spain to Barbados chasing moonshadows.

October 12, 2013October 12, 2013

The Pleiades – The Stellar Seven Sisters

The stars of the Pleiades sit amid a dusty sky in Taurus.

These are the famous Seven Sisters of Greek legend, known as the Pleiades. They are the daughters of Atlas and Pleione, who are also represented by stars in the cluster. Many cultures around the world tell stories about these stars, but in Greek tradition their appearance signalled the summer sailing season in the Mediterranean. The Pleiades first appear at sunset in the eastern evening sky in autumn and put in their last appearance in the western sky in spring.

One story has it they were placed in the sky to recognize their devotion to their father Atlas and his unending labour in holding up the heavens. They are the half-sisters of the Hyades, another nearby cluster of stars in Taurus. Other stories describe the Pleiades as the Seven Doves that carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus.

A seldom-used name now for this cluster is the Atlantides, from the plural form of Atlas, their father. Thus, these sisters gave their name to the Atlantic Ocean, a vast and uncharted sea until the 16th century. The term “atlas,” first used by Mercator for a book of maps, comes not from the Pleiades’ father but from a real-life king in Morocco who supposedly made one of the first celestial globes.

I shot this portrait of the Sisters a few nights ago, stacking a set of five 15-minute exposures with the TMB 92mm refractor and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800. I processed the image to bring out the faint clouds of dust that pervade the area.

The Pleiades are passing through dust clouds in Taurus and lighting them up. The stars are embedded in dust, lit blue by the light of the hot stars. But even farther out you can see wisps of dust faintly illuminated by the light of the Pleiades.

The stars are thought to be about 100 million years old, quite young as stars go. They formed together in a massive nebula that has long since dissipated, and will travel together for another few hundred million years until the sister stars go their own way around the Galaxy. The stellar family that gave rise to so many legends around the world will be scattered to the stars.

October 11, 2013

A Star-Filled Scene in Cassiopeia

A star cluster and nebulas highlight a glorious starfield in Cassiopeia.

I shot this three nights ago on a very clear autumn evening. The telescope field takes in the star cluster Messier 52 at upper left, a cluster of 200 stars about 5000 light years away. It is one of the best objects of its class for viewing in small telescopes. Charles Messier found it in 1774 as part of his quest to catalog objects that might be mistaken for comets.

The brightest area of nebulosity below M52 is the Bubble Nebula, aka NGC 7635, found in 1787 by William Herschel. It’s an area of star formation marked by a central bubble of gas (just visible on the scale of my photo) being blown by the winds from a hot central star. The Bubble can be seen in amateur telescopes but is a tough target to spot.

Above the Bubble is a small bright nebula, NGC 7538.

Below the Bubble lies a larger claw-like nebula known only as Sharpless 2-157, an object that shows up only in photos.

In all, it’s a complex and beautiful field, set in the constellation of Cassiopeia the Queen.

A footnote for the technically minded: This is a stack of 5 x 15 minute exposures with a filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800 shooting through a TMB 92mm apo refractor at f/4.8, mounted on an Astro-Physics Mach 1 mount guided by a Santa Barbara SG-4 autoguider.

October 10, 2013

Zodiacal Light – Dawn’s Early Light

The ghostly glow of comet dust brightens an October dawn.

This is the zodiacal light, as it appeared two mornings ago in the pre-dawn sky from my backyard in southern Alberta. This tapering glow angled up from the horizon is best spotted in the eastern sky on clear and moonless autumn mornings, like this one.

What you are seeing is sunlight reflected off dust left by passing comets in the inner solar system. So while this glow looks like it might originate in our atmosphere it really comes from dust out in interplanetary space.

This subtle glow, often called the “false dawn,” appears in the hour or so before the true dawn begins to brighten the sky too much (its purple light is just starting to light the horizon here).

Also visible here: Sirius at far right, Jupiter above centre, the Beehive star cluster below Jupiter, and Leo rising embedded in the zodiacal light, with Mars just above Regulus, Leo’s brightest star. The planets lie along the zodiacal light because the dust that causes it also lies in the same plane as the orbits of the planets, the ecliptic plane.

I shot this with a 14mm lens for a stack of four 2-minute tracked exposures, but with the horizon coming from just one of the exposures to minimize blurring from the moving camera slowly following the sky.

October 9, 2013October 9, 2013

The Veil Nebula in Cygnus

This is what’s left of a star that exploded thousands of years ago.

I shoot this object every year or two, so this is my 2013 take on the Veil Nebula. For last year’s see Star Death Site, a post from September 2012.

The Veil Nebula is a supernova remnant. The lacework arcs are what’s left of a massive star that blew itself to bits in historic times. This object, one of the showpieces of the summer sky for telescope users, is now high overhead at nightfall, off the east wing of Cygnus the swan.

I shot this a couple of nights ago using a 92mm-aperture refractor that provides a wide field of view to easily frame the 3-degree-wide extent of the nebula. The image is a stack of five 15-minute exposures with a filter-modified (i.e. red sensitive) Canon 5D MkII camera at ISO 800. Stacking the images helps reduce noise.

The colours in this object make it particularly photogenic, with a contrast of magenta and cyan. At right, a sharp-edged area of obscuring interstellar dust tints the sky brown and dims the stars.

October 8, 2013October 8, 2013

Comet ISON Passes Mars

Comet ISON passes Mars on its inbound journey toward the Sun.

This was the scene on the morning of October 8, 2013, with Comet ISON (top), still small and faint, passing the planet Mars, the bright object at bottom. The comet was actually close to Mars in space in addition to appearing close to Mars in our sky.

Comet ISON is the much-heralded “comet of the century,” but so far has failed to live up to expectations. It may never become visible to the unaided eye. Or it could blossom into a dawn spectacle after it rounds the Sun on November 28.

Only time, and the vagaries of comets, will tell.

This image is a stack of five 5-minute exposures with a 92mm aperture refractor and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600.

October 6, 2013

The Cocoon Nebula in Cygnus

A cocoon of glowing gas sits at the tip of a dark cloud of interstellar dust.

It’s been months since I’ve shot more “traditional” astrophotos, meaning images of deep-sky objects through telescopes. But the last couple of nights have been excellent, and well-timed to the dark of the Moon.

This is the Cocoon Nebula in Cygnus, aka IC 5146. It is a cloud of gas about 4,000 light years away where new stars are forming. They are lighting up the gas to glow with incandescent pink colours.

The Cocoon sits at the end of snake-like dark nebula known as Barnard 168 which, in the eyepiece of a telescope, is usually more obvious than the subtle bright nebula. Photos like mine here, with long exposures and boosted contrast and colours, make nebulas look much brighter and more colourful than they can ever appear to the eye.

For the technically curious, I shot this with a 92mm diameter apochromatic refractor, the TMB 92, and a Borg 0.85x flattener/reducer, a combination that gives a fast f-ratio of f/4.8 with a very flat wide field. I also used my now-vintage filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800. This is a stack of five 12-minute exposures, registered and median-combined in Photoshop to smooth out noise. All processing was with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CC. The telescope was on an Astro-Physics Mach 1 mount, flawlessly autoguided with an SBIG SG-4 autoguider.

October 5, 2013

The Princess Stars

The stars of Andromeda the Princess highlight the autumn sky.

Here’s an image from last night, October 4, that frames all of the constellation of Andromeda, now high in the northern autumn sky. A trio of coloured stars arcs across the centre of the image, forming the main pattern in Andromeda. In Greek legend she was the daughter of Queen Cassiopeia and was rescued by Perseus from the devouring jaws of Cetus the Sea Monster.

Above the centre star lies the constellation’s most famous feature, the Andromeda Galaxy, shining at us from 2.5 million light years away. It is the most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye.

An equal distance below the centre star of Andromeda you can see another smaller fuzzy spot. That’s the Pinwheel or Triangulum Galaxy, a dwarf spiral 2.8 million light years away, but also a member of the Local Group of galaxies that contains our Milky Way and Andromeda as its two main members.

At left, just below centre, is a large open cluster of stars, NGC 752, easily visible to the naked eye.

For this shot, as I do for most constellation portraits, I used Photoshop to layer in a shot taken through a diffusion filter (the Kenko Softon A) on top of a stack of shots taken without the filter. This allows me to add the enhanced glows around stars to bring out their colours, and to do so in a controlled fashion by varying the opacity of the filtered view. Shooting on a night with high haze or cirrus clouds has the same end effect but that’s hardly a reliable way to take constellation images. Combining filtered and unfiltered views works great, and gives the “look” made popular years ago by Japanese astrophotographer Akira Fuji.

October 1, 2013

A Red October Aurora

A red and green aurora lights the night on the Canadian prairie.

This was certainly a surprise aurora, with conditions officially registering as “quiet” early in the evening. However, checking Spaceweather.com showed the interplanetary magnetic field was tipped far south, a good sign.

So I made a point of checking after dark and sure enough, a fairly bright aurora was present all across the northern horizon. Conditions now registered “storm!”

The main image above is looking east, back over Saskatchewan. What was remarkable was the intense red curtains above the main green arc. These were invisible to the naked eye but the camera sure picked them up.

There was also an odd green band in the southern sky, above. Again, the green band was obvious to the naked eye, but the camera picked up an isolated red arc as well.

This is proving to be a quiet solar maximum, but the best displays often come on the downside of the cycle. So with luck we’ll be in for some good sky shows in the next couple of years.

October 1, 2013

Moon and Mars in the Morning

The waning Moon shines below Mars and beside the star Regulus in the dawn twilight.

This was the scene before sunrise this morning with the waning crescent Moon near Mars (above the Moon) and the star Regulus (left of the Moon) in Leo. Mars is getting the attention this week as Comet ISON flies near the planet and also appears near Mars in our earthly sky.

However, the comet is still very faint and needs a large telescope to see from Earth. It will be interesting to see if any of the Mars probes are able to image it, as ISON is still fainter than predicted and might be beyond their reach to detect. But if they do, they could help determine just how big ISON is and that in turn will tell us if it might survive its November 28 passage round the Sun to become a fine dawn object in December.

September 30, 2013

King and Queen of the Sky

Cassiopeia and Cepheus reign over the autumn sky amid the Milky Way.

This is a photo from last night’s shoot, taken on a very clear autumn night with the Milky Way prominent across the sky. I shot sets of constellation images, among them this one framing Queen Cassiopeia and King Cepheus.

Cassiopeia is the well-known “W” pattern at lower left. Cepheus is harder to pick out – he’s a crooked square at right, topped by a tall triangle, like a child’s drawing of a house.

The Milky Way runs across the frame, peppered with red nebulas, from IC 1396 at far right in the bottom of Cepheus, to the NGC 7822 complex at centre, and the IC 1805 complex at far left. Lots of smaller nebulas dot the scene. At far left is the Double Cluster, two adjacent clumps of stars in the outer Perseus Arm of the Milky Way. Most of the deep-sky objects in this frame lie thousands of light years away in the next spiral arm out from the one we live in, or in the space between the two arms.

Most of the bright stars here are young blue stars. But a couple of exceptions stand out: yellow Shedar (or Alpha Cassiopeiae, the bottommost star in the W and an orange giant), and red Mu Cephei, at far right bordering the round IC 1396 nebula. That star is also known as Herschel’s Garnet Star. It is a red supergiant star 1400 times larger than our Sun and one of the most luminous stars in the catalog.

September 23, 2013

Equinox Highway

Highway One heads into the setting equinox Sun.

I try for this shot every year, and every year I’m thwarted by low clouds over the Rockies to the west.

So here’s the shot from tonight, Monday, September 23, the night after equinox. Had the horizon been perfectly clear tonight the Sun would have appeared right at the end of the Trans-Canada Highway as it set behind the Rockies. Instead, it disappeared higher up and to the left, behind low cloud.

At equinox (fall or spring) the Sun rises due east and sets due west. So tonight, it was shining into the eyes of all the drivers as they headed west into Calgary – a little demonstration of the annual motion of the Sun.

The previous night, Sunday, Sept. 22, I shot a time-lapse movie of the scene, again hoping for a clear shot to the setting Sun. Alas! A neat movie but still not quite what I was after.

There’s always 2014. But I think I need to aim east and catch the rising Sun at equinox instead. The mountains attract too many clouds.

September 22, 2013

Big Dipper in the Badlands

The Big Dipper swings behind the Hoodoos in the Red Deer River badlands on a moonlit night.

Last night I headed north to the Red Deer River valley to shoot a time-lapse over the river with the badland hills lit by the rising waning Moon. After finishing that I stopped at the popular Hoodoos tourist attraction on Highway 10 east of Drumheller. I had the place to myself at midnight, and the photo ops around the moonlit hoodoos were many.

These formations form when harder capstone rock prevents the soft lower layers from eroding in the rain.

The Big Dipper was nicely positioned above the hills as it swings low across the northern horizon in autumn.

Here I aimed back toward the Moon, with its glare muted by high cloud, and backlighting the hoodoos. The stars of Perseus are rising at left. Unlike normal astrophotography, with nightscape work, and certainly time-lapse shooting, clouds can be a benefit.

This was a great spot to end an evening of nightscape shooting.

September 20, 2013

Harvest Moon Panoramas

The Harvest Moon rises into the dark arc of the Earth’s shadow.

What a perfect night this was. The Full Moon rose into a crystal clear sky, tinted with the dark blue shadow of our planet arching across the eastern sky.

The main image above is a 7-section panorama sweeping from northeast to southeast, but centred on the rising Harvest Moon rising almost due east.

The Moon came up just before the Sun set. The panorama below shows that scene. It’s a crop of a full 360°, 45,000-pixel-wide panorama, taken just as the Sun was setting almost due west and the Moon was rising 180° away in the east.

I took both panoramas with a Canon 5D MkII and 50mm Sigma lens, with the segments at a 30° spacing. That way I take 12 segments to cover a full 360°, a habit leftover from the days of shooting photo pans for planetarium projection systems consisting of 12 Kodak slide projectors.

My previous post showed some still frames from a time-lapse movie of the rising Harvest Moon. The final movie is above, assembled from 670 frames taken at 2-second intervals with the Canon 60Da and 200mm lens. I’ve shot this subject a few times now, but this was my best capture of the rising Full Moon at harvest time, always the most photogenic Moon it seems.

It was a marvellous night for a moonrise!

September 19, 2013

Harvest Moonrise at Sunset

The Harvest Moon rises with pink hues into the deep blue twilight over prairie fields.

This was the scene tonight, September 19, as the Full Moon rose into a clear eastern sky. The view was perfect, with a cloudless horizon (for a change!) and the Moon prominent and pink as it rose into the twilight sky.

The main image is from a few minutes after moonrise. The bottom image, with a dimmer Moon, is from just after moonrise.

In neither case did I punch up the Moon in contrast or colour separately from the sky to make it stand out more than it did in real life. And I certainly did not paste a telephoto lens shot of the Moon into a wide-angle scene. That’s faking it. This is real.

Both frames are from a 670-frame time-lapse sequence, from the Moon first peaking above the horizon to when it rose out of frame at top right. That’s still in processing!

September 19, 2013

Harvest Moonset at Sunrise

The Harvest Full Moon sets into a prairie scene lit by the rising Sun.

This was the scene this morning, September 19, as the Full Moon set just after sunrise on a perfectly clear morning.

Clear, of course, but for the only clouds in the sky just where I wanted to shoot. However, in this case they did help make the scene, adding more colours to the western sky at dawn.

This was the true Harvest Moon, as moonset occurred only a couple of hours after the official moment of Full Moon. However, the setting moons of Wednesday night, September 18 and Thursday night, September 19 can both claim to also be the Harvest Moon, the Full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox.

I plan to shoot the Moon coming up again, 12 hours after it set for this photo, and right at sunset tonight.

September 17, 2013

Pleiades Rising Through the Old Farm Gate

The Pleiades rises beyond the old farm gate on a moonlit prairie night.

It’s been a wonderful few nights for nightscape photography, with a bright gibbous Moon lighting the golden prairie landscape. Skies have been clear and the nights warm, ideal for 3-hour shoots of old farmsteads and prairie scenes.

I’ve spent the last few nights at the abandoned farm near home, shooting time-lapses. This is from Monday night, and is one frame from a 360-frame dolly-motion time-lapse.

The Pleiades star cluster rises in the east over the old barn and farm gate. A car travels through the coulee, leaving a streak of headlights.

I hope the weather continues, so I can harvest some more images, making time-lapse “hay” while the Moon shines!

September 13, 2013

Star-Making Clouds in Cygnus

The centre of Cygnus is laced with an intricate complex of glowing gas clouds.

This is another shot from earlier this week, under ideal skies, in a view looking straight up into Cygnus the Swan. This is a telephoto lens shot of the amazing array of nebulas in central Cygnus, around the bright star Deneb.

At left is the North America and Pelican Nebulas. At right is the Gamma Cygni complex and the little Crescent Nebula at lower right.

Here we’re looking down our local Cygnus-Orion arm of the Milky Way into a region of star formation rich in glowing hydrogen gas and dark interstellar dust. These clouds lie about 1500 to 3000 light years away. Dotting the field are hot blue stars newly formed from the raw ingredients making stars in Cygnus.

At top, the clouds have a lacework appearance, like sections of bubbles. Perhaps these are being blown across space by the high-velocity winds streaming from the young stars.

September 12, 2013

The Summer Triangle Stars

The trio of Summer Triangle stars flank the Milky Way in the dying days of summer.

I shot the featured image above two nights ago on a perfect late summer night from home. Skies were dark and transparent, with no aurora and little airglow to taint the sky.

The image takes in the Summer Triangle stars of Vega (top), Deneb (left) and Altair (bottom). Vega and Altair straddle the summer Milky Way, but Deneb lies right in the thick of it, way down the Local Arm that we live in. Vega and Altair are nearby normal stars, only 25 and 16 light years away. But Deneb is a blue supergiant, shining from 1400 light years away, and one of the most luminous stars in the catalog.

The Milky Way through this area of sky is riven by twisting lanes of interstellar dust. A particularly dark patch sits above Deneb at top left. Then below Deneb the Milky Way gets split by the Great Rift that continues down into Aquila and Ophiuchus at lower right.

All along this part of the Milky Way, particularly around Deneb, the camera picks up a string of glowing red nebulas where stars are forming. The red comes from hydrogen atoms emitting deep red light, as hydrogen is wont to do.

Summer Milky Way from Backyard (Sept 9, 2013)

This image is from a couple of nights earlier. I used a wider angle lens to take in the full sweep of the summer Milky Way, from Sagittarius skimming the horizon, to Cassiopeia past the zenith at the top. You can see the Summer Triangle in the top half of the image, the part of the sky now overhead on early September nights from the northern hemisphere.

I took both shots with a filter-modified Canon 5D MkII placed on a little iOptron SkyTracker for tracked long exposures (4 to 5 minutes). The main image was with a 24mm Canon lens, the bottom image with a 14mm Rokinon lens.

September 8, 2013

Moon and Venus in the Prairie Twilight

Tonight, the waxing crescent Moon passed by Venus for a close conjunction in the evening twilight.

At this time of year from my latitude of 51° north, the evening ecliptic always swings low across the southwest. So any fall evening planets, and the Moon, appear low on the horizon and set early.

That was the case tonight, for the close passage of the Moon past Venus (at right). However, their altitude allowed me to capture them and the prairie horizon in the same telephoto lens field.

It was certainly a beautiful sight over the harvested prairie fields, on what feels like an autumn night, though officially it is still summer.

September 7, 2013

The Great Arc of the Milky Way

The Milky Way sweeps in a great arch of light across the sky.

It’s been a wonderful week for shooting the Milky Way. I had a very clear night on Tuesday but ventured no further than a few hundred feet from home to the harvested canola field next door.

The Milky Way was beautifully placed, as it always is at this time of year, right across the sky from northeast to southwest, with the starclouds of Cygnus passing directly overhead.

The top photo is a panorama of 8 shots, with a camera on a tripod, and each exposure being just 60 seconds with a 14mm lens in portrait orientation. I stitched the segments with PTGui software, rendering the scene with its spherical projection mode which wraps the dome of the sky onto a flat surface in a way that retains the zenith detail as your eye saw it, but greatly distorts the extremities of the scene at either end.

My house is at lower right.

For this image, I used the same lens to take a single view from horizon to well past the zenith. Here the camera was tracking the stars for a set of stacked 5-minute exposures to grab even more detail in the Milky Way.

What stands out as much as the Milky Way are the green fingers of airglow stretching across the sky. These were invisible to the eye but the camera sure picks them up.

Airglow is caused by oxygen atoms, in this case, fluorescing at night as they release some of the energy they absorbed by day. It’s not aurora and generally covers more of the sky, sometimes with a diffuse glow or, as here, with more structured bands that slowly shift over minutes. It varies from night to night and can occur at any latitudes. But usually only cameras pick it up. To the eye, airglow just makes the sky look inexplicably a little less dark than you think it should be on such a clear night.

September 3, 2013

Last of the Summer Milky Way

The summer Milky Way sets behind the peaks of Waterton Lakes National Park, signalling an end to summer.

This was the scene last Saturday night, on a perfect summer night in the Rockies. The glorious starfields of the summer Milky Way are setting behind the mountains.

The Small Sagittarius Starcloud is just above the mountain ridge while above it are the red patches of the Swan and Eagle Nebulas.

Farther up the Milky Way, stars brighten into another starcloud, the Scutum cloud, flanked by two dark lanes of dust. Above it shine the stars of Aquila, Ophiuchus, Lyra, and southern Cygnus. The two bright stars are Altair (below) and Vega (top right).

This is an alternative view of the same scene, with the camera in “landscape” orientation.

I took both from a pull-off on the Red Rock Canyon road in Waterton. Each image is a stack of four 3-minute exposures, each tracking the stars with the camera on an iOptron SkyTracker.

The Milky Way from Canada just doesn’t get any clearer or the skies any darker.

September 2, 2013

The Milky Way over Milk River

The summer Milky Way sets over the Milk River on the last weekend of the summer.

This was the view last night, Sunday, September 1, from the Visitor Centre hill overlooking the spectacular Milk River valley and the sandstone formations of Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta.

The Milk River winds around the park’s campsite, filled on a beautiful long weekend with campers enjoying the clear skies and temperatures in the 30s by day. At night, conditions were perfect. Warm, dry, no bugs, no wind. The best.

I set up two cameras: one for a day-to-night time lapse and one for a time-lapse panning the scene as the Milky Way moved to the west. These two images are frames from the latter.

Above is a shot from later in the evening when the sky was dark …

… while this image is from earlier in the shoot, when the last of the blue twilight still lit the sky and the camera was aimed a little more to the east.

On the horizon at left in the image above lie the Sweetgrass Hills of Montana, a prominent landmark in southern Alberta. The yellow sky glows are from towns in northern Montana.

Lights from the campground and car headlights illuminate the landscape and the eroded hoodoo formations.

Writing-on-Stone Park preserves ancient rock petroglyphs that record scenes from before and after contact with Europeans. It is a sacred site to First Nations people and is a marvellous place for stargazing.

September 1, 2013

Waterton Lakes Panoramas (Night and Day)

Two panoramas compare the view of Waterton Lakes National Park by night and by day.

Last night was as perfect as it gets here in the southwest corner of Alberta. The sky was crystal clear and the wind was calm, unusual for Waterton Lakes.

I spend the night travelling around the Park shooting nightscapes, including this night pan taken from the shoreline in the townsite, again contending with the light pollution of unshielded town streetlights, and the glare from lights on the Prince of Wales Hotel. But even they can’t wash out the marvellous Milky Way.

Just after taking this I went up to the Hotel to shoot scenes from its overlook, back toward the town. As I walked up to the Hotel, a guest was getting out of her car and waving an iPhone around with an astronomy app, hoping to see the stars. I overheard her saying, “I guess we won’t see a lot of stars from here,” referring to the glare of the lights of the Hotel.

The night panorama sweeps from northwest to southwest over 270°. At left we’re looking north toward the prairies. An aurora there would have been well-placed and timed. As it is, there is just the faintest hint of Northern Lights. At right, is the centre of the Galaxy area of the Milky Way.

Stars shine reflected in the unusually clam waters of Upper Waterton Lake.

This day panorama takes in a smaller angular sweep. I took it from a similar shoreline location just at sunset, as the last rays of the Sun lit Vimy Peak in alpenglow. Returning to dock on the last voyage of the day is the historic tour boat, The International, a wood-hulled ship built in 1927, the same year the Prince of Wales Hotel opened. It plies these waters every summer and by winter is stored in a dry dock down the lake on the U.S. side.

It’s been a wonderful weekend here. More photos are in the processing pipeline. But for now, it’s off to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.

August 31, 2013

Stars over a Grand Hotel

The stars and fleeting clouds appear over the grand Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Lakes National Park.

This was the scene last night, Friday, August 30, on a less than ideal night for nightscape shooting. But I made the best of it with some still shots in and around the Waterton townsite.

This is a view from Driftwood Beach on Middle Lake, looking south toward the Prince of Wales Hotel, the Park’s famous landmark, and a well-illuminated one at that. It shines beneath the Milky Way and clouds lit yellow from the town’s streetlights. It would take some work converting this site into a Dark Sky Preserve!

Built in 1927, the Hotel is a large log structure that has miraculously survived fire, and the howling winds that can blow at gale force down the lake. It was built by the American Great Northern Railway to lure American tourists north from Montana’s Glacier National Park.

August 31, 2013August 31, 2013

The Milky Way at Waterton Lakes

The Milky Way glows bright in the twilight of a summer evening at Waterton Lakes National Park.

It’s been a marvellous weekend so far at Waterton Lakes, with another fine night ahead it appears, on a warm weekend to end the summer. Two nights ago I set up cameras on the shore of the main lake, shooting south to the Milky Way. The main photo above shows the Milky Way while the sky was still deep blue with evening twilight.

Light from the campground streetlights illuminates the old tree and foreground. It is light pollution to be sure, but sometimes added lighting can help, especially on a dark moonless night.

This shot comes from later in the evening with a wider angle lens and shows the Milky Way under dark sky conditions at the end of the long Upper Waterton Lake that extends south into Montana and Glacier National Park.

By stacking about 35 images taken in quick succession, each 1-minute exposures, I created this star trail effect. I used the new version of StarStaX, a free program that does a great job stacking star trails. Its latest version offers this neat “comet trails” effect as an easy-to-apply stacking option.

August 30, 2013August 30, 2013

Waterton Lakes by Night

The Milky Way shines over the peaks of Waterton Lakes National Park on a clear summer night.

This was the view last night, August 29, under very clear skies, on the Red Rock Canyon Road in Waterton Lakes National Park, a UN World Heritage Site and a beautiful place for day and nighttime photography.

This is a 7-frame panorama sweeping over about 180° from the southeast at left and into the northwest at right, taking in the autumn constellations rising at left, over to the Milky Way in the south and to the Big Dipper skimming across the northwest horizon at right. Each frame was a 30-second exposure at f/2.2 and ISO 1600.

The green glow at left is from airglow, while the yellow and magenta colours at right are from low-level aurora and from the lights of Pincher Creek and the Crowsnest Pass communities. The bright light at left of centre is from the lights adorning the Prince of Wales Hotel, set amid the general glow of streetlights from the townsite of Waterton Lakes.

The foreground is lit only by starlight.

August 27, 2013August 27, 2013

Milky Way Over Moraine Lake

The summer Milky Way shines from behind clouds coming over the Continental Divide at Moraine Lake, Banff.

Earlier in the day, thousands of people stood here, admiring the famous view of Moraine Lake set in the Valley of Ten Peaks. This was the view by night, before the waning Moon rose to light the scene. I was the only one there.

A couple of hours after I took this image, the peaks were well lit by moonlight, but clouds had moved in to obscure the stars. This shot from the start of the night shows the sky at its clearest and darkest.

The last time I visited Moraine Lake at night was back in the 1990s shooting with 6×7 film. I’ve wanted to get back with digital cameras for some years. Last Sunday, August 25 was my chance.

Despite the encroaching clouds, I managed to shoot time-lapses with three cameras: a dolly shot with the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero, a pan in azimuth with the new Radian controller, and a tilt-pan with the Sky-Watcher AllView mount. All worked well, but had the night been perfectly clear the movie clips and stills would have been all the nicer. But you go with what the mountains deliver.

This is one of the best of the frames from the night’s shoot, taken with a 14mm Rokinon lens for 60 seconds at f/2.8 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 4000.

It shows one of the issues with shooting near lodges and resorts – yes, it’s convenient and safe (I’m reluctant to hike far in the dark alone, with Grizzly in Area and Travel in Groups signs about!) but even the most eco-friendly of resorts fail to realize the effects of their lights spilling out over the natural landscape. In this case, they do help light the dark scene, but they are pollution. When, oh when, will parks and resort operators begin to realize that the night is an environment to be protected as well, and not a jurisdiction to be ruled by lawyers and planners who dictate that the worst and usually cheapest types of lighting be installed.

P.S.: This was blog post #350 for me!

August 26, 2013

Big Dipper Over Castle Mountain

The famous stars of the Big Dipper dip behind the moonlit crags of Castle Mountain.

I just got back from four days in Banff, always a great place to be, even if it is cloudy. And it was!

I lost one night to forest fire smoke and another to rain clouds. On Saturday and Sunday nights I managed to seek out some clearer skies for nighttime shooting. This is a shot from Saturday, from a favourite photo stop on the Bow Valley Parkway overlooking the cliffs of Castle Mountain.

Despite the dew from rains earlier in the day I managed to shoot a time-lapse here. These two shots are frames from the movie which pans slowly across the scene.

This frame catches an Iridium satellite flare above the Dipper.

Light from the waning gibbous Moon, which was in and out of clouds itself, illuminates the scene and nicely cross-lights the Castle cliffs.

August 20, 2013August 20, 2013

Cassiopeia Rising in the Badlands

The stars of Cassiopeia rise behind hoodoo formations in the Alberta Badlands.

I took this Sunday night, August 18, as part of my shoot at Dinosaur Provincial Park. This is a particularly striking pair of hoodoos at the start of the Badlands Trail where I’ve been meaning to take some moonlit nightscapes for a couple of years.

This night’s conditions were perfect, with the “W” of Cassiopeia nicely placed, and the Moon providing excellent cross-lighting, under a clear blue sky, for the contrasting colours of earth and sky.

August 19, 2013

Dinosaur Moon

The waxing Moon rises into a colourful twilight sky over the badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

What a great night it was last night! Warm summer temperatures (at last!) allowed for shirtsleeve shooting even well after dark. To shoot on the warm August night I went out to Dinosaur Provincial Park, a magical place to be at sunset and in the summer twilight. The colours on the badlands are wonderful. It’s earth-tones galore, with the banded formations from the late Cretaceous blending with the sagebrush and prairie flowers.

This was the scene after sunset, as the waxing Moon rose into the eastern sky coloured by the blue band of Earth’s shadow, the pink Belt of Venus and dark blue streaks of cloud shadows converging to the point opposite the Sun. That’s where the Moon will be Tuesday night when it’s full. But last night it was a little west of the anti-solar point.

I managed to grab this image as soon as I got to my photo spot on the Badlands Trail, just in time to catch the last rays of the setting Sun illuminating the bentonite hills of the Badlands. Both shots are frames from a 450-frame time-lapse, taken with a device that also slowly panned the camera across the scene over the 90-minute shoot.

It, and three other time-lapses I shot after dark, filled up 40 gigabytes of memory cards. It’s been a terabyte summer for sure!

August 15, 2013

The Great Lone Land … and Great Big Sky

A vast blue sky and summer storm clouds arch over a prairie landscape.

This is a place where you are out on the vast open plains, looking much as they would have appeared hundreds of years ago. This is big sky country, in southwest Saskatchewan. I shot this 360° panorama last Sunday, on a road I get to take every few years that is one of the great drives in western Canada.

Some years it is too wet and impassable. Other years it is too dry and closed because of the fire hazard.

This is the Gap Road, a mud track at times between the Saskatchewan and Alberta units of Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park. The road crosses private rangeland but the cattle are the only giveaway that this is a modern scene and not one from the 19th century.

In 1872 the British explorer and adventurer William Francis Butler crossed the prairies and northern plains in the last days of the buffalo culture, before the cattle and ranchers arrived. He called it then The Great Lone Land. You feel that sense in a place like this, out on the open treeless plains. 150 years ago great herds of bison roamed here. And it was here that the North West Mounted Police set up their first outpost in the area, at Fort Walsh, to stop the incursions of the American “wolfers.”

The sky dominates the scene. I spent an hour here, shooting a time-lapse of the approaching thunderstorm, at right, coming toward me from miles away, until it filled the sky and threatened to turn the road back into mud.

It was a wonderful day spent crossing the prairies, and traveling back in time.

August 14, 2013

Wheatfield Moon

The waxing Moon shines above a ripening field of wheat on a prairie August evening.

A track winds off through the wheat field toward the western twilight sky, while a waxing Moon shines in the south.

This was the scene tonight just down the county road where I live, on a warm August night on the Canadian Prairies.

For this shot, I assembled a high dynamic range set from eight exposures taken over a range of 8 f-stops, to compress the wide range of brightness into the one photo. Even so, the Moon remains overexposed. But I like shooting these scenes in deep twilight for more saturated colours and for some stars in the sky.

August 11, 2013

Sunset from the Cypress Hills

The Sun sets over the pines and prairie of Cypress Hills, Alberta.

Tonight it was too cloudy for meteors. But the sky did provide a very fine sunset.

I was at the Horseshoe Canyon viewpoint on the Alberta side of Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, to catch a deep-red Sun going down into haze and cloud. This is looking northwest, from the pine-covered hills out over prairie plains of southern Alberta. The image is a high-dynamic range stack of 7 images.

The viewpoint also had an interpretive sign explaining the virtues of dark sky preservation – Cypress Hills Park is a large dark sky preserve – and I was pleased to see one of my photos used as an illustration on the sign. I had sent it to the Park several years ago.

But alas, no meteors in view tonight. And while there were a few visible the night before at the star party, out of 200+ shots I took, not one recorded a decent Perseid meteor! Of course!

August 11, 2013August 11, 2013

Space Station Over a Star Party

The Space Station flies over a campground of astronomers awaiting the fall of darkness.

Last night was the main night for summer star parties, being a dark-of-the-Moon Saturday in August. As I usually am each year, I was in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan, attending the annual Saskatchewan Summer Star Party. About 330 attended this year, a near record year.

The night was partly cloudy but stayed clear enough for long enough to allow great views. As the sky was getting dark the International Space Station flew over from horizon to horizon, west to east, passing nearly overhead. I had a camera and ultra-wide lens ready and caught the pass in 10 exposures, each 30 seconds long, here stacked in Photoshop. The accumulated exposure time also makes the stars trail in circles around the North Star at upper right.

It was one of many fine sky sights hundreds of stargazers enjoyed this weekend at the SSSP, and no doubt at dozens of other star parties around the continent this weekend.

August 4, 2013

Saturday Night Under the Stars

On a summer Saturday night hundreds gathered to enjoy the stars and Milky Way.

What a fine night this was. Last night, Saturday, August 3, I helped out at one of the annual Milky Way Nights presented by the University of Calgary’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. About 300 people attended, under nearly perfect conditions. The few clouds that rolled through later in the night didn’t detract from the views of the Milky Way and deep-sky objects.

Part way through the night I conducted a laser tour of the night sky. It was pretty neat presenting a “planetarium show” under the real stars to about 150 people gathered on the hillside lying on blankets and in lawn chairs. Astronomy outreach doesn’t get much better!

Folks from the local astronomy club set up their telescopes on the patio for public viewing. This is a fish-eye lens image I took in the twilight for use in an upcoming digital planetarium show I’m working on that will tour people through the Milky Way.

A highlight was the opportunity for people to look through one of the largest telescopes in Canada, the 1.8-metre ARC Telescope that is normally used for spectroscopy but can actually be equipped with an eyepiece. Here, observatory director Dr. Phil Langill lines up the telescope on Neptune.

The event went from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. We started these Milky Way Nights in 2009 for the International Year of Astronomy and they have been big hits every summer since, one of the legacies of IYA.

July 29, 2013

Moonshadows and Sunbeams

The play of light and shadow in the open air create wonderful effects by night and day.

The Moon and Sun have each created some wonderful sky scenes of late, aided by clouds casting shadows and sunbeams across the sky.

Above, the rising waning Moon on Saturday night shone its warm light across the prairies. Clouds cast dark shadows diverging away from the Moon.

By day, clouds created the opposite effect. Holes in the clouds let through beams of sunlight, creating rays descending from the sky dancing across the land.

Both effects are technically known as crepuscular rays. You can read much more about the phenomenon at the wonderful Atmospheric Optics website. Clouds aren’t always the evil presence in the sky astronomers take them for. They can produce stunning effects. Just look up!

July 28, 2013

Canola Field Stars

Stars in a blue sky wheel above a ripening field of yellow canola.

It’s been a couple of fine nights of nightscape shooting under the light of the waning Moon and clear skies.

I’ve been shooting from no more exotic location than my local rural neighbourhood, travelling for 5 minutes to spots near one of the many canola fields growing nearby. I wanted to grab some nightscapes over the fields before they lose their yellow flowers and turn green.

The feature image above looking north is from a time-lapse sequence and stacks several images with the “comet trail” effect, to show the northern stars turning about the North Star.

This image, also a frame from another time lapse with a longer lens, shows the Big Dipper above that same field but in an exposure short enough to prevent the stars from trailing. You can now make out the familiar Dipper pattern.

This is a very Canadian scene, with the Big Dipper high in a northern latitude sky, and with the foreground crop a Canadian one – Canola was developed in the 1970s at the University of Manitoba. The “can” in canola stands for Canada. Pity there was no aurora.

July 25, 2013

Star Rain

The sky seems to swirl in a rainstorm of stars.

I’ve combined several exposures of the stars in the northern sky to create a “comet trail” effect, showing them turning about the celestial pole. The top photo looks northwest to the stars around the Big Dipper and picks up the purple light of a faint aurora.

For the photo below, taken on a different night, I used a fish-eye lens to capture the entire sky, but looking north. You can see how the sky turns counterclockwise about the Pole Star. The Milky Way also appears as a blurred band of light.

I shot these last week from the cabin at Reesor Ranch in Saskatchewan during a wonderful week of nightscape photography in the Cypress Hills.

To create these images I used the Advanced Stacking Actions from Star Circle Academy.

July 17, 2013

Wild Rose Stars

The floral emblem of Alberta, the wild rose, appears in front of a twilit starry sky.

Last night was another good one on the Ranch! I had three cameras shooting from my log cabin front yard – I had no ambition to travel farther afield this night, after 6 nights in a row of shooting around the Cypress Hills. This is a scene from one of the time-lapses taken from “home,” of prairie flowers in front of a prairie sky.

I also took the opportunity to reshoot the popular “Milky Way over Log Cabin” scene, getting better results I think than the shot I posted from the first night I was here a week ago. This was with the specially-modified camera that picks up the red nebulosity in the Milky Way better. The colours are much nicer.

Finally, this is a 360° panorama of the scene from last night, taken before the Moon set but when it was behind the trees out of sight. Its light still illuminates the sky blue, yet the Milky Way still stands out. The red lights are from two other cameras shooting time-lapses. This is big sky country for sure!

It’s been a wonderful week of shooting on the century-old Reesor Ranch in the Cypress Hills. I highly recommend the location for anyone who wants an authentic western experience in a stunning setting. I’m sure I’ll be back.

July 16, 2013July 17, 2013

High Plains Panorama of the Night Sky

The silvery Milky Way and green bands of airglow stretch across the high plains and big sky of the Cypress Hills.

The Moon had long set and the night looked as dark as it could be. No lights interrupted the flat clear horizon. These are the high plains of the Cypress Hills, the highest place in Canada between Labrador and the Rockies.

And yet, in the panoramic photos I took last night the sky revealed its true colours.

In the 360° panorama above, the Milky Way arches overhead from northeast to southwest. It was obvious to the naked eye. But stretching across the sky from east to west are also bands of green and red airglow that were completely invisible to the eye, except perhaps for making the sky look more grey than it might have otherwise.

These aren’t aurora but are emissions of light caused by oxygen atoms fluorescing as they give off some of the energy they absorbed by day. Time-lapse sequences show these bands moving slowly across the sky.

I drove up the Graburn Road last night, to the plateau of Cypress Hills, to shoot a time-lapse of the Milky Way moving above this lone tree on the plains. It’s called the Survivor Tree, subject to drought, blizzards fire, cattle, and even being cut down at one time. But still it survives. With a cold wind blowing last night I had a taste of what this tough Lodgepole Pine has had to endure.

This is one frame from the final movie clip, with the tree and sky still lit by the light of the setting waxing Moon. An enduring tree beneath the timeless stars.

Early in the evening the northern sky was also marked by another sky phenomenon, noctilucent clouds – very high altitude clouds still lit by sunlight long after the Sun has set locally. These clouds made for a nice photo for a few minutes but soon faded from view as the Sun set even as seen from where these clouds live at the edge of space.

The night was left dark, with no aurora tonight – just the Milky Way and the faint wisps of airglow over the high plains of southern Alberta.

July 15, 2013

Road to the Northern Lights

A country road winds off into the dancing Northern Lights.

The sky put on another fine show last night, the fourth in a row with some level of aurora activity. This was the scene Sunday night as a display blossomed for a while, dancing at the end of the back road through the Cypress Hills on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.

I had one camera shooting north and devoted to the Northern Lights, while, as you can see below, I had two other cameras on rigs to shoot time-lapse movies looking south.

This was the scene at the overlook to the Battle Creek valley, with the Moon setting and me getting the time-lapse gear going, to shoot the Milky Way moving over the hills. One camera was on a mount to pan across the landscape following the stars. The other camera was on a motion control dolly to travel down a track over the 3 hours of the shoot. I spent a lot of time in the car listening to BBC Desert Island Discs and The Life Scientific podcasts last night — the thrill of time-lapse shooting!

This is one frame from one of the movies. Streaks of green and red airglow tint the sky around the Milky Way. Amazingly, the scene is lit only by starlight and by the aurora. You could never have done this with film. It’s the sensitivity of digital cameras that makes such scenes possible, though it takes some clever processing (such as Shadow Detail recovery in Raw, Shadows and Highlights, & masked Adjustment Layers) to balance Earth and sky in the final image.

July 15, 2013

Milky Way Over a Misty Lake

The misty starclouds of the Milky Way shine above the misty waters of Reesor Lake.

This was certainly a magical scene – the stars above the still waters of a misty lake. Above the tree-lined hills lies the constellation of Sagittarius and the heart of the Milky Way. The dark structure comes from interstellar dust, the stuff we’re made of. Everything in the foreground on Earth comes from the stuff you can see in the sky.

I shot this Saturday night, on a beautiful, if damp, night for nightscape photography in the Cypress Hills, Alberta. I helped the scene along by “painting” the mist with a white flashlight.

For those who like their Milky Way images in portrait mode, here’s one of the same scene, showing more of the sweep of the summer Milky Way up from the southern horizon, from Sagittarius to Aquila.

And while I don’t often take shots of people in scenes, I couldn’t resist getting into the photo myself here, standing on the boardwalk gazing at the centre of the Galaxy.

July 14, 2013July 14, 2013

Moonset on a Misty Lake

What a marvelous night for a moonset!

Saturday night was one of the finest nights for nightscape shooting I’ve had in a long time. I started with shots of the waxing Moon setting over Reesor Lake, one of the lakes in Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, on the Alberta side. Water from this lake drains into the Milk River and then into the Missouri, and Gulf of Mexico. It one of the few bodies of water in Alberta that feed the Mississippi watershed, with the Cypress Hills acting as a continental divide.

I set up two cameras, each shooting a twilight-to-night time-lapse sequence showing the Moon setting behind the hills and the stars coming out. I filled up one card with 600 images. Luckily, the other camera still had space left for what was still to come later that night. One sight was the beautiful auroral arc I featured in my previous blog post. I’ll have more tomorrow, of the Milky Way over the lake.

It had rained earlier in the day so the air was humid. Mist covered the lake as night fell. In the scene above, a small fleet of American pelicans also glide by.

Watching the peaceful scene while monitoring the cameras clicking away provided one of those magical moments that makes doing this photography worthwhile, regardless of the results. The mist was swirling, the stars were coming out, I put on some music on the iPhone and on came a Chopin nocturne. Perfect.

July 14, 2013

The Grand Sweep of the Auroral Oval

The Northern Lights sweep across the northern horizon in a classic arc of green and magenta curtains.

The aurora on the night of July 13/14 never got very bright but the sweep of the auroral oval still made for an interesting panoramic image.

I shot this at about 2 a.m. local time, from the high plains of southwest Saskatchewan, right on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, on the rolling hills of the historic Reesor Ranch. The only man-made light visible is a glow on the horizon just left of the auroral arc, from the city of Medicine Hat, Alberta.

The panorama takes in about 180° of sky, framing the sweep of the auroral oval across the northern horizon from northeast to northwest. In fact, you can see the gravel road I was on at far left and far right. The main band of green from glowing oxygen is topped by curtains of magenta, from oxygen and nitrogen atoms.

If you could see this display from space you would see it as an oval of light across the top half of North America. From my perspective on Earth, I could see just a portion of the complete oval, as an arc across the northern sky.

To create this image I shot 6 segments at 30° spacings, each a 30-second exposure with a 24mm lens at f/2.8 on a Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. I used Photoshop to stitch the segments. It blended them seamlessly.

July 13, 2013July 13, 2013

Star and Satellite Trails

A long exposure captures streaks from the turning stars and passing satellites.

This was a busy sky. The feature photo stacks a dozen images taken over 6 minutes.

During that time the northern stars around the Big Dipper turned about the celestial pole just off frame at upper right.

Meanwhile, two satellites passed through the field, both flaring in brightness briefly, tracing tapered streaks from left to right above the treetops. These may have been Iridium satellites, infamous for producing sunglint flares as they momentarily reflect the Sun from their mirror-like antenna panels.

A magenta aurora tints the northern sky as well.

This image is from the same sequence of 300 or so I took last night for a time-lapse movie, but this is a single 30-second exposure so the stars look more natural and pinpoint. Now you can make out the familiar pattern of the Big Dipper.

I shot several sequences last night, until the clouds rolled in and curtailed photography. However, skies are clearing again and the forecast is for several clear nights to come over the Cypress Hills. I’ve got a few locations picked out for time-lapse shooting if the skies cooperate.

July 12, 2013

Log Cabin in the Milky Way

The summer Milky Way shines over a log cabin in the woods of the Cypress Hills.

This was the view this morning, at 2 a.m., as the Milky Way of northern summer shone over my vacation log cabin on the Reesor Ranch in Saskatchewan. After the clouds cleared the sky was beautifully dark for a while before the early dawn twilight came on.

The view here takes in the Milky Way from the Scutum star cloud above the trees to the dark dust clouds of northern Cygnus overhead. The trio of Summer Triangle stars, Deneb, Vega and Altair, flank the Milky Way.

This is a composite of five tracked and stacked images for the sky and one image for the foreground shot with the iOptron Skytracker running at half speed to minimize the blurring from the tracking motion. The lens was the 14mm Samyang at f/2.8.

July 12, 2013

Sunset Panorama at Reesor Ranch

The setting Sun lights up a classic Canadian prairie skyscape.

This was sunset last night, July 11, from the historic Reesor Ranch in southwest Saskatchewan, on the north edge of the Cypress Hills. The clouds opened up across the sky in a Chinook arch, with clearing to the west where the waxing Moon and Venus were also setting into the twilight.

It was a stunning scene looking out over the plains from the highlands of the hills.

I’m in the area for a week of shooting, weather permitting.

This shot is a 7-section panorama, stitched with Photoshop’s Photomerge command.

July 11, 2013

The Purple Curtains of Northern Lights

Curtains of purple and pink top the usual green bands of aurora.

The last couple of nights have been very clear and filled with aurora. Two nights ago, July 9, the sky really let loose for a good display showing a great range of colours. Only the green was readily visible to the naked eye, but the cameras picked up the fainter bands of purple and magenta.

Most of the colours here come from oxygen atoms glowing. But high up, in the near vacuum of space, oxygen can glow red. The curtains can also be lit by sunlight coming over the pole, lending a blue tint to the aurora. The two colours blend to give purple.

Lower down in the atmosphere, green lines from oxygen predominate. When an aurora is very energetic, the incoming electrons can trigger nitrogen lower in the atmosphere to glow red and pink, giving the curtains a red fringe on the lower edge. That didn’t happen this night.

This fish-eye shot of the entire sky shows the high purple curtains arching up the sky. Over several minutes they separated and ascended away from the main green band, shooting up the sky. It seemed as if they were their own curtains and not just a different coloration fringing the main display.

The Northern Lights have been active lately so keep an eye on Spaceweather.com and AuroraWatch for alerts and warnings.

July 9, 2013July 10, 2013

Sunrise on the Plains

The Sun rises into a pastel palette of sky and earth tones.

I woke up early, just at sunrise, looked outside and wow!

I grabbed the camera and telephoto and got another nice shot right from my back deck. The canola field next to my yard is proving to be a photogenic foreground now that it’s in full bloom, just in the last couple of weeks.

There was enough haze and humidity in the air to dull the Sun to a fiery orange. The range of shades in earth and sky was wonderful. It was a classic prairie scene worth getting up for.

Being able to see the horizon is why I live on the plains and not in the foothills or mountains. And certainly not in the city!

July 7, 2013

The Milky Way over a Canola Field

The Milky Way arches over a field of yellow canola on a dark summer night.

The night was beautifully clear and moonless with a glow to the north of perpetual twilight still lingering. The Milky Way was obvious so I hiked to the middle of the canola field next to my house, visible here lit by the red lights at left.

To shoot this panorama I used the same technique as in the The Colour of Dark panorama image from last month which has proved quite popular: I shot eight exposures at 45° spacings using the 8mm fish eye lens. Each was a 60 second exposure at ISO 4000 and f/3.5. I assembled the panorama using PTGui software, from images processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

The sky was well exposed but the ground was still dark, lit only by starlight. It took some processing in Camera Raw (Shadow Detail) and Photoshop (Shadows and Highlights) to bring out the yellow field of canola in the foreground.

While the sky looked neutral grey to the eye, I’ve punched up the colours a lot to reveal the blue twilight, green and magenta aurora to the north, bands of greenish airglow across the sky, and yellow glows of light pollution.

The odd streaks of light on the canola are reflections of the horizon lights in the soaking wet dew on the canola. It was a very damp night after a day of rain.

July 5, 2013July 7, 2013

Low Bow over Canola

A horizon-hugging rainbow shines over a blooming field of canola.

You don’t often see a rainbow like this. Just the top of the bow pokes above the horizon and a field of yellow canola.

The reason is the Sun’s altitude. When I shot this in late afternoon yesterday, July 4, the Sun was 40 degrees up in the northwest. That means the point opposite the Sun was 40 degrees below the horizon in the southeast. Rainbows are centred on this anti-solar point and are always 42 degrees in radius. So doing the math shows that only the top 2 degrees of the rainbow arc could be visible above the horizon, creating a rainbow chord.

Later in the evening as another storm receded, a more classic bow appeared, this time as a double rainbow. With the Sun now much lower the anti-solar point was higher and more of the semi-circular bow appeared in the sky. I wish I could have shot a time-lapse of “rainbow rise” but downpours of rain prevented me from leaving the camera out.

These are neat examples of the play of light and colour in the open air. For lots more information, check out the wonderful Atmospheric Optics website.

July 1, 2013

Aurora over a Prairie Lake

A brief display of Northern Lights shines over a prairie lake.

Last night I went out to a nearby lake (there aren’t many in southern Alberta!) to shoot the twilight over water, and hoping to catch some aurora or noctilucent clouds as well.

There was lots of twilight but very little sign of aurora or NLCs. But at about 1 am the aurora kicked up briefly, enough to make a good photo but certainly nothing to get excited about for its visual appearance. It was just visible.

However, it was a fine evening of shooting at a quiet prairie lake. Crawling Lake is one of several reservoirs in the area that are part of the extensive irrigation system in southern Alberta. Despite the recent floods, this area is usually dry and drought-sticken.

This shot, which I took early in the evening, shows the lone star of Capella, shining in the twilight of a solstice summer sky. From my latitude of 51° N, Capella, normally considered a winter star, is circumpolar. It never sets and so can be seen skimming along the northern horizon on short summer nights.

An ultra-wide view shows the perpetual twilight of summer to the north, with the circumpolar stars of summer above. A campfire from some late-arriving campers is on the shore at right.

Happy Canada Day!

June 29, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights

The Northern Lights danced all night, as Earth was buffeted by winds from the Sun.

As soon as I saw the warning notices at Spaceweather.com I was hoping we would be in for a wonderful night of aurora watching. I wasn’t disappointed.

Forewarned, I headed out to the Wintering Hills Wind Farm near my home in southern Alberta. I thought it would be neat to get shots of the effects of the solar wind from beneath and beside the wind turbines of the farm. The shot above is from a time-lapse movie taken with a fish-eye lens that will look great when projected in a full-dome digital planetarium.

I shot with three cameras, with two aimed east to where the brightest part of the auroral arc usually sits. It was also exactly where the Moon would rise after midnight. This shot, above, captures the scene right at moonrise, which was also right when the aurora kicked into high gear as a sub-storm of solar particles rained down on our upper atmosphere. The ground lit up green with the glow of oxygen in the mesosphere, some 100 kilometres up.

This shot, taken moments later with a longer focal length lens, grabs the waning Moon shining behind the distant wind machines, and beneath the arc of auroral curtains.

In all, I shot 50 gigabytes of raw images, both still images and frames for time-lapse movies. I’ve assembled most of them into a musical collage that honours the night. In the final sequence of the movie, it almost looks like the wind machine is facing into the brunt of the solar wind, as pulses of aurora surge from out of the east toward the turbine towering overhead.

The music is by a new favourite artist of mine, the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. His latest album of alt-classical/new age music is called “In a Time Lapse.” How could you not like that?! Buy it on iTunes. It’s stunning.

I hope you got to see the Night of the Northern Lights in person. If not, I trust these images and movies give you a sense of the wonder of what the solar wind can do.

June 28, 2013

Coal Dust Stars

The timeless stars turn above a long-abandoned coal mine near East Coulee, Alberta.

For decades, between 1912 and 1979, homes and trains were fueled by coal from the Atlas Coal Mine, one of many in the river valley near Drumheller, Alberta.

Thousands of mine workers populated the boom towns set in the badlands of the Red Deer River. The mines and most of the people are long gone. The Atlas Coal Mine was the last to close, holding out well into the current age of natural gas for home heating and diesel for the trains.

It’s the only mine with buildings that still exist, now as a tourist attraction with daily tours of the mine, both above and below ground.

I spent the evening there last night, the only visitor, except for the owls and coyotes. I was shooting time-lapse sequences and some stills. The shot above is a composite of twenty 1-minute exposures to create the star trails.

For those who prefer a more realistic scene, the short-exposure image above captures the sky more as the eye saw it, with Arcturus and the stars of the Big Dipper shining above the massive wooden tipple.

The Drumheller area is rich in history and photo ops, both for day and night shooting.

June 27, 2013

Night of the Noctilucent Clouds

It was a beautiful summer evening, with stars wheeling overhead in a moonlit sky and the only clouds far away and interesting.

This was one of those nights we get once or twice a summer when the much-anticipated noctilucent clouds – the clouds of summer – put on a perfect show. In my previous post I featured an image from early in the night, last night, June 26, 2013.

These are images and time-lapse movies from later in the night. The composite image above shows stars trailing over 90 minutes with the brilliant noctilucent clouds on the horizon, and fringed by a rosy glow of red twilight where the southern edge of the cloud display, which sits over the Northwest Territories, is being lit by a setting Sun with red sunlight filtering through our atmosphere as it passes over the North Pole.

This telephoto lens shot above captures a close-up of the rosy-fringed noctilucent clouds, behind a lightning-lit thunderstorm rolling through storm alley in central Alberta. The storms can stay there! We’ve had enough of them for a while!

My time-lapse sequence extends over about 90 minutes and opens with a wide-angle view of the display as it appeared low on the horizon. What follows are two closeup views that really show the intricate wave-like motion of these high-altitude mesospheric clouds, and their changing lighting and colours.

These are beautiful clouds drifting on the edge of space but it takes time-lapse to reveal their fluid-like motion.

June 27, 2013

Thunderstorm and Noctilucent Clouds

Two very different forms of clouds drift along the horizon: a thunderstorm nearby and low, and noctilucent clouds far away and high.

This was the scene last night, as another thunderstorm to the north of me rolled along the horizon drifting away to the east. A bolt of lightning illuminates the storm clouds. The thunderstorm was over central Alberta, and at the bottom of our atmosphere, in the troposphere.

Meanwhile, in the background, a beautiful display of noctilucent clouds crept along the horizon in the other direction, drifting to the west. These clouds were over the Northwest Territories, a thousand or more kilometres away to the north and 80 to 100 kilometres high, at the top of the atmosphere in the mesosphere.

The NLC display lasted all night, or for at least as long as I was able to stay up and shoot.

This is a telephoto lens shot that zooms into the brightest part of the NLC display.

June 26, 2013June 26, 2013

Thunderstorm in the Moonlight

A thunderstorm rolls across the northern horizon with the stars of Cassiopeia and Andromeda rising.

This was a perfect night for storm shooting. The storm was far enough away to not engulf me in rain and wind, but close enough to show detail and reveal its bolts of lightning. A waning gibbous Moon shone in the south lighting up the storm clouds to the north and turning the sky blue.

Meanwhile the stars of Cassiopeia, Perseus and Andromeda were rising behind the storm clouds, a nice contrast of Earth and sky.

I’ve been after a confluence of circumstances like this for a few years. An aurora to the northeast would have been nice as well. But you can’t have everything!

June 25, 2013

Bow River Returning to Normal

The raging waters of the Bow are subsiding leaving a city to clean up the mess.

This was the scene Tuesday night, June 25, in a panorama I took from a favourite spot overlooking the skyline of Calgary, a place where many news reports emanated from over the weekend.

It is amazing how fast the floodwaters have retreated. The Bow River is still very high and swift, and some parts of the valley are still under water, but the river is quickly returning to its normal channels and size.

Tonight, people were walking and hiking along paths and bridges that three days ago were underwater or closed to all traffic. Indeed, much of what is below me in this photo, including Memorial Drive, was covered with water. Riverside neighbourhoods that were lakes are now streets again, though lined with houses soaked and damaged. Construction crews work to shore up badly eroded banks. The floods have certainly changed the riverbed of the Bow.

And still, in the sky storms and rain continue to threaten. It will be months, if not years, before everything returns to a new normal.

June 23, 2013June 23, 2013

Floodwaters at Bow River Crossing

This is not a picture of the amazing sky but a document of what the sky can do when it decides to be merciless.

No one has seen anything like this in living memory, with homes under water and the river swollen to a lake engulfing the Bow River Valley.

These panoramas depict the heart of the Siksika First Nation, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. It was in this valley, where the Blackfoot had traditionally held their summer camps, that Treaty 7 was signed in 1877 between Chief Crowfoot and James Macleod of the NWMP. The history of the area is presented at the beautiful Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park interpretive centre, shown in the image below. We’ve held several popular public stargazing sessions there. It was closed today, ironically due to a lack of safe water.

It was here at this spot in the Bow River Valley that nomadic hunters could easily cross the river. Up to this weekend a bridge, seen in the distance in the image below, had allowed modern travellers to make the crossing. But no more. The bridge is closed and may never reopen, until it is rebuilt. Today, water was roaring just below the bridge deck. And waters have receded in the last 24 hours.

There is some fear that a ferry downstream, the Crowfoot Ferry, one of the last river ferries in Alberta, might break loose and crash into the Bassano Dam.

Dozens of homes are underwater and hundreds of people displaced to evacuation shelters. The water came up so fast many people had just minutes to get out.

Those I spoke to today, including one 68-year-old resident, said they have never seen the Bow flood as bad as this. The high waters, having breached the Carseland Dam upstream from here, are now heading downstream to fill the Bassano Dam and flood the lower Bow and South Saskatchewan River through Medicine Hat. As those upstream clean up, those downstream prepare for the onslaught of water.

June 22, 2013

The Rising of a “Supermoon”

Here is the much hyped Supermoon of 2013 rising into a twilight sky on the wet Alberta prairies.

A clear night for a change, with no storms about. Though one rolled through earlier today. We don’t need any more rain! Thankfully I am high and dry on the Alberta prairie but many friends to the west are not so lucky and have been flooded out, evacuated or have been camping in their homes with power and heat off. Calgary has largely come to a standstill, with the main pastime being watching the rivers rise and fall.

Tonight, after two days of destruction from horrific floods, at least we in southern Alberta were able to enjoy a clear night and the sight of the wonderful solstice Moon rising. This is the closest Full Moon of 2013 and has received an inordinate amount of PR as the “supermoon.”

It certainly did look fine tonight, though in truth no one could ever tell the difference between this “supermoon” and any normal Full Moon.

But perhaps this one is a little special, reminding us that the sky brings beauty as well as destruction.

June 21, 2013

Summer Solstice Panorama on the Prairie

This is the prairie night sky taken at the moment of summer solstice.

I shot this 360° panorama in the field near my house just before midnight on June 20, 2013, right about the official time of summer solstice. This is the longest night of the year and the brightest. The presence of the gibbous Moon contributes most of the night light, but there to the north at left you can see the glow of twilight and an aurora. At right, the waxing Moon shines in clouds, surrounded by a faint halo from ice crystals in the clouds.

Nights around solstice are always bright and filled with wonderful colours and atmospheric phenomena.

The tranquility of the solstice scene is in contrast with the horrific weather disaster taking place west of me near the mountains, as record floods from torrential rains wash away roads, railway lines, and houses. Roads are closed in and out of the mountains and entire neighbourhoods of Calgary near rivers are being evacuated.

Everyone knows somebody who is affected. For many this is indeed a very long and stressful night. I hope everyone keeps safe.

June 18, 2013

A Retreating Prairie Storm

A stunning storm cloud retreats across the prairies leaving clear skies in its wake.

The timing could not have been better. On Monday night, June 17, a thunderstorm retreated to the east at just the perfect time to catch the light of the setting Sun.

As these prairie storms often do, this one left behind clear skies, with a quarter Moon at right to the south and the Sun to the west, off frame but illuminating this amazingly sculpted cloud. Downdrafts in the thunderhead produced the mammatus clouds – the bulbous structures hanging from the thundercloud. The low Sun angle emphasizes their form.

We’ve had a lot of rain and storms lately, but when a storm puts on as fine a show as this one, I’ll take it!

This image is a 3-segment panorama using the Canon 5D MkII and 16-35mm lens at 16mm. I used Photoshop’s Photomerge and Adaptive Wide Angle filter to stitch and straighten the image.

June 14, 2013

The Milky Way at Solstice

The centre of the Galaxy culminates over a starlit landscape on a night near the summer solstice.

This was last weekend, on the same night I took the images of the aurora and noctilucent clouds featured in the previous two blog posts. But toward the end of the shoot, I turned south to capture this scene, of the Milky Way over a grassy prairie field.

The landscape is lit only by starlight and by the glow of twilight and aurora to the north.

In the sky, the constellations of Scorpius and Sagittarius are peaking as high as they get for me in southern Alberta. The red giant star Antares is to the right while the bright star clouds toward the centre of our Galaxy are just left of centre. The sky is not dark because of the glow of perpetual twilight at this time of year near solstice.

Deep sky fans will note that the star cluster M7, the southernmost Messier object, is just clearing the horizon.

Remarkably, this is a mere 15 second exposure, at ISO 1600 but with the 24mm lens wide open at f/1.4. Normally I wouldn’t shoot at that wide an aperture as the images look too distorted at the corners of the frame. But for this shot I used the Canon 60Da camera – its cropped-frame sensor records only the central area of what the lens projects so it crops out the nasty stuff at the corners of the frame that would certainly have been detracting had I used the full-frame camera.

But shooting at f/1.4 allowed even this quickie 15-second shot to grab lots of detail in the Milky Way.

June 10, 2013June 10, 2013

Time-Lapse: Northern Lights and Noctilucent Clouds

What strange clouds these are, moving where there shouldn’t be winds, and forming where there’s barely any air.

These are noctilucent clouds, sometimes called polar mesospheric clouds. Their icy strands form around particles at the top of the atmosphere some 80 km up. There’s almost no air up there so just how these clouds form has always been a mystery. They may be condensing around meteoric dust particles. They may also be more common now than in past decades and centuries, as the upper atmosphere cools due to an odd quirk of global warming that sees the lower troposphere warm while the upper mesosphere cools.

This was the first display of NLCs I’ve seen so far this season. They can only be seen, and indeed they only form, in summer. Sunlight streams over the pole and lights these clouds all night long. They are literally “night-shining” clouds. Only from a latitude range of 45° to 60° north and around summer solstice is the geometry right to see the clouds, usually as electric blue cirrus strands moving slowly along the northern horizon.

The time-lapse movies capture their motion over 30 to 90 minutes of shooting.

The 40-second movie contains three clips:

• The first, a wide-angle view of the amazing aurora that danced in fast accompaniment to the slow noctilucent clouds.

• The second clip, very short, zooms in a little more to the northern horizon. However, I cut that sequence short so I could switch lenses and take the next clip.

• The third scene is with a telephoto lens, framing the east-to-west slow motion of the clouds. I took 4-second exposures at 1-second intervals so it shows some pretty fine motion.

This was certainly one of the best NLC displays I’d seen and my best shot at capturing them.

What was especially rare was seeing them accompanied by auroral curtains actually moving among the clouds (or so it appeared). Both are up high in the near vacuum of near space, but they may have been miles apart in latitude.

June 10, 2013June 10, 2013

Northern Lights & Noctilucent Clouds

Colourful sky phenomena combine to provide a remarkable sky show.

What a night this was! On Sunday, June 9 the aurora kicked off with a burst in the bright twilight but really got going as the sky got dark, shooting beams of magenta and blue up from the main green arc.

Then on cue, streamers of noctilucent clouds appeared low in the north, shining with their characteristic electric blue. These are odd clouds at the edge of space lit by sunlight streaming over the Pole.

Both these apparitions of the upper atmosphere glowed above a horizon rimmed with the orange of perpetual twilight set in a deep blue background sky.

Yes, the camera has brought out the colours more intensely than the eye saw, but nevertheless it was a remarkable evening close to solstice. This is a magical time of year when all kinds of sky glows light the night.

This night the European Einstein ATV cargo craft also flew over, twice, each time about 10 minutes ahead of the even brighter Space Station that it is chasing for a docking later this week.

More images to come from this night, including time-lapses of the Lights and Clouds.

June 8, 2013June 9, 2013

The Colour of Dark

What colour is the dark night sky? Depending on conditions, it can be any colour you want.

I shot this 360° panorama last night from my backyard under what looked like a clear and fairly dark, moonless sky. Looks can certainly be deceiving. The camera picked up all kinds of colours the eye couldn’t see.

Let’s review what’s causing the colours:

• To the north just left of centre the horizon is rimmed with a bright yellow glow from all-night perpetual twilight present around summer solstice at my mid-northern latitude.

• Above that shines a green and magenta band from a low-level aurora just visible to the naked eye.

• Much of the sky is tinted with bands of green from ever-present airglow, caused by oxygen atoms at the top of the atmosphere giving off at night some of the energy they absorbed by day. I had thought the sky would look blue from the perpetual twilight but the airglow seems to overwhelm that.

• Yellow glows around the horizon at left (west) and right (southeast) are from urban light pollution from towns 50 km away.

• Some strands of remaining cloud from a departing thunderstorm add streams of brown as they reflect lights from below.

• Finally, the Milky Way shows up in shades of yellow and pale blue, punctuated here and there by red patches of glowing hydrogen hundreds of light years away.

The only thing missing this night was a display of electric blue noctilucent clouds.

The sources of most of these colours are an anathema to observers of faint deep-sky objects. Aurora, airglow and certainly light pollution just get in the way and hide the light from the distant deep sky.

A word on technique:
I shot this panorama using an 8mm fish-lens to shoot 8 segments at 45° spacings. I used the excellent software PTGui to stitch the segments together, which it did seamlessly and flawlessly. Each segment was an untracked 1 minute exposure at ISO 3200 and f/3.5. The panorama covers 360° horizontally and nearly 180° vertically, from the ground below to the zenith above. It takes in everything except the tripod and me!

June 5, 2013

All-Night Satellites

It was a marvellous night for Space Station watching.

Right now those of us at northern latitudes in North America are enjoying the opportunity to see the International Space Station come over not once but often 2 or 3 times a night, as it is now lit by the Sun all night long (on our nights down here on Earth, that is).

Here are two shots from the night of June 4-5, 2013 taken from my home in Alberta at a latitude of 51° North.

My featured image above is from the ISS pass that began at 1:55 am, and is a stack of 4 tracked 2.5-minute exposures, so the stars are not trailed, but the ground is! On this pass, the ISS came overhead. This view is looking north, toward the all-night perpetual twilight we see on the Canadian Prairies around summer solstice. There’s also a low band of green aurora on the northern horizon.

I shot the image below on the ISS’s pass one orbit earlier at 12:18 am. This image is looking south to the ISS’s high pass across the south. It’s a composite of 4 untracked 2-minute exposures – thus the stars are now trailing in circles around Polaris at the top of the frame.

Both shots are horizon-to-horizon all-sky views with an 8mm fish-eye lens.

The sky isn’t dark, even in the shot taken at 2 am. At this time of year around summer solstice at northern latitudes, the sky never gets astronomically dark but is lit a deep blue by sunlight still streaming over the pole and bathing the night in a glow of perpetual twilight.

June 1, 2013June 1, 2013

Time-Lapse Techniques — Creating Star Trails

The stars wheel above the Cretaceous-age sediments of Dinosaur Provincial Park.

One of the most powerful techniques in the nightscape photographer’s arsenal is to stack lots of short-exposure images together to create the equivalent of one long exposure showing the motion of the stars. A creative tool to do this in Photoshop is the “Advanced Stacking Actions” from Steven Christenson who maintains a blog and eStore called Star Circle Academy.

I used one of his Actions to create the feature image above. Unlike more run-of-the-mill stacking procedures, Christenson’s nifty Actions can create star trails that look like comets or streaks fading off into the sky at their tail end. It’s a clever bit of Photoshop work achieved by stacking each successive image at slightly lower opacity.

You can use his Actions to create a single composite still image, as above, or to create a set of “intermediate” frames that can be turned into a time-lapse movie with stars turning across the sky and drawing trails behind them. My movie shows several variations. Click the Expand button on the movie to have it fill the screen and reveal the sub-titles.

In Clip #1 I stacked the original set of 360 images without any trailing, using the original frames that came from the camera, albeit with each frame processed to enhance contrast and colour.

In Clip #2 I stacked the images using the “Comet Trails” Action, one that produces very short comet-like streaks.

In Clip #3 I used the “Long Streak” Action to produce longer star trails, but the process also creates unusual cloud streaks as well. Rather neat.

In Clip #4 I used the more conventional “Lighten Mode” to create trails that accumulate over the entire sequence and never fade out. The result on this night was pretty wild and excessive, with the twilight and moonlight adding other-worldly colours.

I certainly recommend the Star Circle Academy Photoshop Actions. While there is a basic Test Set available for free, the full Advanced set is well worth the $30.

May 29, 2013May 30, 2013

Moonlight on the Hoodoos

The stars shine in a bright moonlit sky over the Alberta Badlands.

My feature image above is one of several still frames I took at the end of 4-hour photo shoot last Sunday at Dinosaur Provincial Park. The nearly Full Moon provides the illumination on an eroded landscape originally cut by water from retreating ice age glaciers.

But the volcanic ash layers hold treasures much older, from 70 million years ago. This area contains the world’s richest collection of late Cretaceous fossils of dinosaurs and other flora and fauna from near the end of the dinosaurs’ reign.

The movie below is a 300-frame time lapse of the stars turning behind the hoodoos. It’s a dolly shot, using the Dynamic Perception Stage Zero rail and controller.

The system works very well, but such shots demand a site with a suitable immediate foreground, as well as a good view to the distant sky. It is the parallax motion between foreground and background that makes a dolly move interesting.

I planned this shot to begin at twilight and continue as the sky was darkening, then into the rest of the night with the Moon rising and lighting up the landscape. The moving clouds were perfectly timed and placed!

May 28, 2013

Moonrise on the Badlands

It was a marvellous night for a moonrise. A beautiful night in the badlands

Last Sunday I headed east to Dinosaur Provincial Park, to catch the planet conjunction early in the evening, and then shoot time-lapse sequences of eroded hoodoos lighting up as the nearly Full Moon rose in the east.

The night could not have been better for moonlight photography. The clouds fanned out perfectly from the cameras’ focal points to the north, and in the time-lapse movies (to come!) they add dramatic motion in front of the rotating northern stars.

The feature image above is one of 300 from a motion-controlled dolly shot. The frame below is one of 380 from a static camera time-lapse.

I shot both from a favourite spot at the eastern end of the Badlands Loop drive. As I arrived at sunset, the last of the day-use folks were leaving and I had the place to myself. There was no wind, no humidity, few bugs, mild temperatures and the solace of absolute quiet broken only by some passing geese and the occasional chorus of coyotes.

Even if the images had not turned out it would have been worth the trip.

May 26, 2013May 26, 2013

Aurora at the Observatory

A low aurora appears in the city skyglow and bright moonlight at the local observatory.

After several days of rain, skies cleared beautifully for a Saturday night star party for the public at the local university observatory, the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory, southwest of Calgary.

The evening was capped off by the appearance, as expected, of an auroral arc to the north. Despite the light from the nearly Full Moon and urban sky glow to the north, the aurora managed to compete and put on a show for a few minutes before fading.

About 100 people attended the evening, and were treated to views of Saturn, shining in the south near Spica. Unfortunately, clouds to the west over the mountains never cleared away enough to allow us views, and me photos, of the triple-planet conjunction of Mercury, Venus and Jupiter. Still, a good time was had by all.

May 22, 2013

Time-Lapse Techniques — A Dolly Shot

Time-lapse shooting has become immensely popular of late, but there’s nothing like a dolly shot to add interest to a scene .

Among the more advanced techniques for shooting time-lapse movies is to place the camera on a motorized track for a cinematic “dolly” shot.

These are easy to do in the daytime as the camera simply needs to slide down a rail at a constant rate. But at night, time-lapse dolly shots become more complex. Exposures are often 15 to 60 seconds even in bright moonlight, as here. During each exposure the camera shouldn’t move. The slide down the track should happen only in the brief time between exposures, typically 2 to 5 seconds.

Accomplishing this “shoot-move-shoot” routine requires a specialized bit of kit. In my case, I use the Stage Zero dolly and MX2 controller from Dynamic Perception.

It works great, and sends the camera down the 6-foot rail at a speed you determine. The controller also operates the camera shutter, ensuring sync between the exposures and dolly motion. You can see the setup in operation below, in a 2-part movie. The first scene shows the dolly and camera in operation over the 2-hour shoot, while the second clip shows the time-lapse sequence the dolly-mounted camera took.

This was one of the easiest time-lapse sequences I’ve shot, as I had to travel no more than 100 feet from my house to do it.

I was after a couple of sequences just to use for demo purposes, and didn’t want to tackle a long shoot far from home on a weeknight.

The bright moonlight on May 20 also meant exposures could be short, so that collecting the 300 frames I typically shoot for a time-lapse could be accomplished in well under 2 hours. Getting to bed before 1 am is a rare treat on a time-lapse night!

May 20, 2013

Aurora All-Night

The Northern Lights dance through the night, ending with a finale burst of blue.

Here’s the time-lapse movie, below, that I shot Friday, May 17, beginning at 11:30 pm and ending 4 hours later at 3:30 am. The sky was bright with moonlight when I started the sequence, with the aurora especially active over half the sky. The display settled down to form a slowly pulsing green band behind the old barn, which went into silhouette after the Moon set.

Then, just as the sky was brightening with the first glow of dawn, the aurora kicked up its heels again and danced across the north, shooting beams of blue across the sky.

I ended the sequence as dawn was fading in … and I was fading out! Still, it was a wonderful night to be out under the stars.

The movie compresses 4 hours of aurora shooting into 40 seconds of aurora playback!

I assembled the time-lapse movie from 1200 frames, each 11-second exposures at 1 second intervals, with the Canon 60Da at ISO 1600 and 10-22mm lens at f/4.

May 19, 2013May 19, 2013

Old Barn By Aurora Light

As the Northern Lights dance they light up an old barn on a moonlit night.

The still frame above is from the movie down below, a 3-hour-long time-lapse taken on May 17, the night of the big aurora display. I shot this with a camera riding along on a motorized dolly track, to provide the panning motion to the scene.

You can see the rig in this image just below, which I took with another camera framing the entire scene.

Aurora over Old Barn #1 (May 17-18, 2013)

Using the second camera, I was intending to take shots showing a motion-control time-lapse sequence being taken, for illustration in talks and publications.

The aurora quickly forced me to change plans with camera #2. But I let the main motion-control camera continue down its track for the rest of the night, resulting in the movie below. At one point in the movie I briefly appear at right, as I moved the second camera to the south side of the barn to look north to the main area of the display.

In the movie, the stars of Virgo and the planet Saturn rise into a sky lit blue by moonlight early in the evening. As the Moon sets, the shadows rise and engulf the barn.

While catching stars rising behind the rustic old building was the original intention of the shot, the Northern Lights added a bonus. Not only do they dance in the sky behind the barn, but the north face of the old grey barn, in shadow from the moonlight, lights up green from the glow of aurora shining in the north.

Very nice. It certainly made for a colourful scene under the skies of southern Alberta.

May 18, 2013May 18, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights – #3

The memorable night of Northern Lights ended with a final outburst sending blue curtains into the dawn twilight.

This is a frame from May 17-18, taken near the end of my time-lapse sequence, when the aurora kicked up again in intensity and shot towering blue curtains into the northern sky. The pink glow of dawn tinges the northeastern sky, bookending the sequence of 1200 frames and 27 gigabytes of images. Good thing I had a large capacity memory card!

Each shot was 11 seconds at ISO 1600 to try to freeze the moving curtains while still maintaining a good level of exposure.

Here, lights from a passing car at 3 a.m. illuminated the old barn.

As a postscript, I also note that this was my 300th blog post since beginning The Amazing Sky in February 2011. I hope you’ve enjoyed the views of the sky I’ve been able to publish over the last two years.

May 18, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights – #2

You know you are in for a good night when the aurora appears even before the sky gets dark.

I shot this in the evening twilight, as the curtains of Northern Lights began their dance in the dusk. Light from the quarter Moon also illuminates the scene. It was a mad rush to get the camera set and aimed to begin shooting. I was also looking after another camera that was shooting a dolly-shot time-lapse of the barn.

For this image I used the Canon 60Da and Canon 10-22mm lens at the widest setting. Even that was not enough to take in the whole of the display that was covering the sky.

May 18, 2013May 18, 2013

Night of the Northern Lights – #1

What a night this was, with a display of Northern Lights dancing across the sky as soon as it got dark. They danced all night.

I set up May 17 at my neighbourhood rustic farmstead for a night of time-lapse shooting of the old barn in the moonlight, but knowing an aurora was likely. My iPad app beeped and alerted me to that possibility only an hour or so before sunset, letting me know a storm was underway. And sure enough, as soon as it got dark, there were the curtains of green dancing all over the blue twilight sky. This frame is from 1200 I shot in a dusk to dawn time-lapse movie. It is from early in evening, with a pink glow of twilight still fringing the northwest horizon.

What marked this display was the blue and purple curtains, with those colours only really apparent in the camera images. I think those tints come from sunlight hitting the auroral curtains high in the atmosphere where the Sun is still shining. At this time of year the high atmosphere never gets dark and is always lit by sunlight streaming over the pole.

More images to come!

May 11, 2013May 11, 2013

A Galaxy Floating in the Void

A galaxy 80 million light years away floats in the blackness of space near a star in the Big Dipper.

This is Messier 109, a bright spiral galaxy in Ursa Major, and within an eyepiece and camera field of the bright naked eye star Gamma Ursa Majoris. That’s the “bottom left” star in the bowl of the Big Dipper, so this is an easy galaxy to find with a telescope in the current spring sky.

Technically, this galaxy is classed as a barred spiral because of the way its spiral arms emerge from an elongated bar at the core of the galaxy. It is the brightest member of the Ursa Major Cluster of some 80 galaxies.

Springtime is galaxy time, no matter what hemisphere you live in. But for us in the northern half of the planet that means April and May. When we look up at this time of year into the evening sky we are looking out of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy and seeing into the depths of intergalactic space, populated by thousands of other galaxies. Most of the bright ones, like M109, are 20 to 100 million light years away. At its distance of 80 million light years, M109 lies a million times farther away from us than Gamma Ursa Majoris, a nearby blue star “just” 80 light years away and in our Galaxy.

I shot this last weekend though my 5-inch refractor with the Canon 60Da camera. Even with the telescope’s 800mm focal length it isn’t enough to really do justice to the intricate detail in galaxies like this. But the view does set the galaxy into its context, floating in the blackness of space.

May 9, 2013May 9, 2013

Scorpius Rising on the Prairies

Scorpius and the star clouds of the Milky Way skim along the southern horizon on the western Canadian prairie.

Scorpius crawls along the horizon at right, with dark lanes of dust converging onto yellowish Antares. Just left of centre a dark horse prances above the treetops. At lower left shines the pink Lagoon Nebula.

With its intricate mix of dark dust lanes and bright star clouds this is the richest region of the Milky Way. It marks the direction toward the centre of our Galaxy. Pity it lies so low in our sky from here in western Canada, at a latitude of 50° North. Compare this view to what I saw two months ago from New Mexico and you can see the advantage of a southerly latitude for any lovers of the Milky Way.

However, I was lucky to get this shot, taken last weekend during the only decent time of the year when I can see Scorpius in a dark sky from my prairie home. The night was very clear, allowing a clean shot to the southern horizon.

May 8, 2013

Milky Way and the Northern Lights

The Milky Way appears from behind the colourful curtains of the Northern Lights.

This was the scene last Saturday night, into the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, May 5, as the summer Milky Way rose in the east while a display of aurora played across the northern sky. The Northern Lights weren’t particularly bright this night, but the long 2-minute exposure I used to bring out the Milly Way recorded the aurora with colours and an intensity only the camera could see this night.

The green is from oxygen glowing in the lower part of the atmosphere, though still some 80 km up, where only rockets and high-altitude balloons can fly. The tops of the auroral curtains are tinged with the pinks from another type of oxygen emission possible only at the very top of our atmosphere, where molecules are few and far between and what’s left of the air that surrounds us meets the vacuum of space some 150 km up.

From Earth it’s hard to visualize just what we are seeing when we look at display like this. But check out some of the Aurora videos at NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. You’ll see time-lapse videos taken from the Space Station as it flies by and through the same types of aurorae with green lower bands and pink upper fringes, beautifully captured floating high above the Earth in vertical curtains reaching up into the blackness of space.

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013

The Milky Way of Spring on the Prairies

Late on a clear spring night on the Canadian Prairies the Milky Way rises over a fallow field.

Despite taking this not 200 feet from my home, this isn’t a view I see or photograph very often. In spring on the Canadian Prairies, it seems we go from dark winter nights to the bright skies of mid-summer with little in between to mark spring. Miss a dark-of-the-Moon period in late April or early May and you miss the opportunity to see and shoot this sight – the summer Milky Way rising late on a dark spring night, with Scorpius due south. In another month this same sky will be washed out by the glow of perpetual twilight around solstice.

By July or August when dark skies return, the Milky Way will be already well up at nightfall, and Scorpius on the way down past his prime for the year.

But in this shot, taken at 3 am this morning, during a welcome run of clear moonless nights, I framed Scorpius at lower right skimming the southern horizon as high as he gets from western Canada. The yellow star at lower right is Antares, the heart of the Scorpion. To the left of Scorpius, the spectacular starclouds of the summer Milky Way span the sky from Sagittarius in the southeast to Cygnus high in the east at upper left.

Around me now, farmers are beginning their work of tilling and seeding the fields. But this one will likely lay fallow this year, the furrows seeming to extend off into the distant Milky Way.

This is a stack of five 2.5-minute tracked exposures, but with the ground included from just one of the exposures, to minimize the blurring introduced by the moving camera. The lens was the wonderful 14mm Samyang, a manual lens that doesn’t register in the camera’s metadata, thus the reading at left that this was taken with a 50mm lens, the default setting when the camera doesn’t know what optics it is connected to.

April 26, 2013

Piercing the Night

All things must pass. A bit of billion-year-old comet dust disintegrates above a decaying pioneer farm.

This was a lucky shot to be sure. Last night I returned to my favourite farmstead site to shoot a time-lapse sequence of the stars turning over the moonlit rustic buildings. I started shooting some test frames to get the settings right — the camera was on a motorized dolly to move it along a track for the next three hours, so you want to make sure you have all the settings right. I opened the shutter to start a test series, and whoosh! A bright meteor appeared. Right on time and in frame. That doesn’t happen very often!

However, shooting hundreds of shots for a time-lapse sequence, now a common practice among astrophotographers, does boost your chances of picking up a bright meteor on one of the frames. But having it appear nicely framed is often too much to ask. I was lucky. But … I was out with a camera aimed at the sky, and for getting good shots that’s the first requirement!

April 23, 2013

Returning to the Earth

The works of man crumble and return to the Earth under the timeless turning of the stars.

OK, a bit of purply prose I suppose, but I think the photo turned out rather neat. This is a favourite spot of mine, at a decaying old farmyard down the road from where I live.

It’s one of many such homesteads in the area, built by the CPR railway on land they were granted as part of their enticement to build “the National Dream” rail line across Canada in the 1880s. The CPR then built houses for the pioneer settlers who came by rail to be dropped off across the Prairies, often with little more in hand than a shovel and a sack of potatoes to get them going. Eventually, the railway would make money shipping the pioneers’ wheat and cattle out.

This old homestead was once part of a community in the area called Ouletteville, a town I assume settled by French Canadians or immigrants from France, but long since gone except for its cemetery up the road.

Now, as the house and farm buildings crumble back to dust, they make great subjects for a little low-effort nightscape shooting, especially when trying out new techniques and gear. I don’t have to invest a lot of time travelling, yet the place is photogenic enough to yield some nice shots.

This night I was testing some new panorama shooting techniques, using a fish-eye lens to shoot an all-encompassing 360° view. But this shot was one of several I took at the end of the night, using a more conventional 24mm lens. It’s a stack of 4 exposures: one short 50-second shot at ISO 800 for the initial stars, and then three 10-minute shots at a ISO 100 for the long star trails.

I shot this Monday evening, April 22, on the first decent night in nearly three weeks in what has been an awful spring. At least most of the snow has gone. The waxing gibbous Moon provided the off-camera illumination.

April 17, 2013

Commander Chris Flies Over My House

Commander Chris Hadfield and his crew fly over my house and below the Moon on a spring night in Canada.

It’s been a couple of months since we in Canada have had a chance to sight the Space Station in our evening sky with our Canadian astronaut on board. When I last had a chance in February, Chris was a crew member. Now he’s the commander of the Station, the first Canadian to hold the position.

My shot, taken tonight on the second of two passes this evening, has the Space Station coming up out of the west and rising to meet the Moon. It passed under the Moon and then faded out as it entered Earth’s shadow and nighttime, one of 16 nights they experienced this and every day in orbit around the Earth.

Chris is in orbit with the Expedition 35 crew until mid-May. So this may be our best and last chance to see our astronaut flying through Canadian skies.

This was also the first decently clear night we’ve had in two weeks, since my last post from April 2. We all hope spring is finally arriving

April 2, 2013

Goodbye Winter Sky!

Say goodbye to the winter sky, now sinking fast into the sunset. The departure of Orion and company is an annual sign of spring.

Look west on a clear night in the next couple of weeks and you’ll see this scene, as Orion sinks into the sunset, surrounded by Taurus to the right of him, and Canis Major to the left of him. Taurus is his foe, Canis Major his friend.

Having so many bright stars in the April evening twilight makes for a beautiful scene in the deepening blue. But I suspect most of us are happy to see all signs of winter gone for a long time!

I shot this Monday night, April 1, on a very clear night. Orion’s Belt is just left of centre. The trio of Belt stars points left and down to Sirius, the Dog Star, and points right and up to Aldebaran, the Bull’s Eye. Above Aldebaran is brilliant Jupiter. Just at the right edge of the frame are the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades.

Say goodbye to these stars of winter. We won’t see them again until late summer in the pre-dawn sky.

April 1, 2013

Conjunction of Comet and Galaxy

Tonight, April 1, we enjoyed the rare conjunction of a comet with a galaxy.

This is Comet PANSTARRS below the Andromeda Galaxy, a.k.a. M31. The two objects were less than a binocular field apart – 4 degrees – on the sky. But in real space they were separated by millions of light years. The comet was 192 million kilometres from Earth tonight and receding. But that’s a stone’s throw compared to the 2.5 million light year distance of the Andromeda Galaxy. Light was taking a mere 10 minutes to get to us from the comet, but the light from Andromeda was 2.5 million years old.

And yet, the two objects looked similar in brightness and shape to the binocular-aided eye.

I caught the two just above the horizon as they were dipping into haze and trees. The circumstances didn’t make for a technically great photo but with PANSTARRS we’ve all had to shoot despite the conditions and hope for the best.

With worsening weather prospects for the next week I suspect this will be my last look at PANSTARRS for a while.

March 31, 2013

Comet Caught in the Trees

Tonight’s view of the comet is a picture of Earth and sky – the comet caught in the bare trees of spring.

PANSTARRS is sure a tough comet to shoot! It remains low and skirting the treetops. Tonight, I decided to keep the camera rolling while the comet dropped into the trees. I think it made for a decent enough comet portrait that certainly tells its story.

This is a stack of six 1-minute exposures with the 200mm lens and 1.4x extender for a 280mm f/4 telephoto, on the Canon 60Da and the Kenko SkyMemo tracking platform.

Tomorrow, if skies cooperate, it’ll be a shot of the comet in the same field as the Andromeda Galaxy. I could nicely catch them both in the field of the 7x binoculars tonight. But the photo op nights are this Monday through Wednesday for the comet + galaxy portrait.

March 30, 2013March 30, 2013

The Easter Aurora

Here’s a celestial gift for the Easter season – a display of northern lights on Good Friday.

It wasn’t a particularly clear night but in this case the clouds added to the photos. In one direction I was shooting the Northern Lights to the northeast, while to the west at the other end of the yard I was shooting the winter sky setting, plus having a quick look at Comet PANSTARRS. It was certainly a sky filled with attractions.

Happy Easter to all and I hope spring is finally arriving where you live – assuming you are a northerner!

March 28, 2013

PANSTARRS Rises into Darkness

At last. A view of Comet PANSTARRS in a dark and moonless sky.

Nearly three weeks after first sighting it, I was able to finally look at and shoot the comet in a fairly dark sky, though with it still embedded in deep twilight. But at least the Moon was out of the way and the sky was dark enough to allow the comet to show off its broad fan-shaped dust tail, set against the stars of Andromeda.

The comet will climb a little higher during the next two moonless weeks as it passes the Andromeda Galaxy on April 2 and 3. However, it’s still very low in the northwest and needs binoculars to sight. You have to wait until the sky is dark to spot it. And hope for no clouds low in the northwest. The comet just dodged some here.

I shot this with a 200mm telephoto for a stack of eight 30-second exposures tracking the stars. The star at left is Delta Andromedae while the one above the comet is Pi Andromedae.

March 23, 2013

PANSTARRS in the Moonlight

Pity this comet is so low and in twilight. Tonight, it suffered the additional indignity of moonlight.

This was Comet PANSTARRS from my front yard tonight, March 23, in a view looking above the trees to the comet setting into the northwest in the bright moonlit sky.

It took binoculars to pick it out visually, and a telephoto lens to frame it photographically with enough scale to show some of the subtle tail structure, in what seems like a broad fan-shaped dusty tail.

We can only hope that next week when the Moon is out of the way, and the comet is a little higher, it will show off more of its developing tail in a darker sky.

As it is, to bring out the comet and background stars I overexposed the frames for this stack of four images, then turned down the brightness and cranked up the contrast in processing. It made for a decent enough portrait of Comet PANSTARRS amid the blue sky and faint stars of Andromeda, the constellation it is travelling through for the next two weeks.

March 20, 2013

The Ghostly Glow of Gegenschein

The band of light at right is the familiar Milky Way. But what’s that faint stream of light to the left? It’s called the Gegenschein.

My last blog showed an image of the Zodiacal Light in the west. In fact, that glow extends up and continues all the way across the sky as a very faint stream of light at the threshold of vision called the Zodiacal Band. But at the place in the sky 180° opposite the Sun the Band intensifies to become a diffuse patch of light. It’s easy to see with the naked eye from a dark site if you know to look for it, and where it is likely to be. Last week, it was sitting below the constellation of Leo, in an area of sky that is pretty blank. So any faint glow stands out.

As with Zodiacal Light, what you are seeing is sunlight reflected off comet and asteroidal dust, but for the Gegenschein (German for “counterglow”) the light is coming from dust opposite the Sun that is scattering light back toward us and the Sun, mirror-like. The back-scattering effect makes the dust appear a little brighter at the point opposite the Sun.

Spring is a good time to spot the Gegenschein (true for the northern or southern hemisphere) as it then lies in a sparse area of sky away from the Milky Way. But you need a moonless sky and a dark site free of manmade light pollution. It and the fainter Zodiacal Band are among the sky’s most subtle sights. Again, Atmospheric Optics has more details.

A bonus with this shot are some short streaks of light below and to the right of the Gegenschein. I think those are from geostationary satellites flaring at the anti-solar point as they, too, acted as mirrors briefly catching the sunlight. Being geostationary – likely communications satellites you aimed fixed dishes at – they stayed still while the stars and tracking camera moved, and so created streaks.

March 19, 2013

The Zodiacal Light from the Desert

From a dark site the glow of Zodiacal Light rivals the Milky Way in brightness.

This was the scene every night last week in the evening sky from our New Mexico observing site. The vertical glow of Zodiacal Light was a source of natural light pollution brightening the western sky. I’ve never see it more obvious in the west and this was the perfect season to see it. In March from the northern hemisphere the ecliptic – the plane of the solar system – is angled high into the western sky, almost vertical from the latitude of southern New Mexico.

The Zodiacal Light lies not in our atmosphere but comes from interplanetary space, and follows the ecliptic. What we were seeing was a glow of sunlight being reflected off fine dust particles orbiting the Sun in the inner solar system, likely spread by passing comets like PANSTARRS. I blogged about the Zodiacal Light last month, in photo taken from home in southern Alberta. You can also read about it at the excellent Atmospheric Optics website.

You don’t need to be in the desert to see it, but you do need dark skies. And no Moon in the sky.

At last week’s dark of the Moon period, Jupiter sat at the apex of the Zodiacal Light, just above the Pleiades star cluster. Near the top, right of centre, you can also see a short satellite trail, likely from a flaring Iridium satellite.

March 18, 2013March 19, 2013

VLA Dishes at Sunset

The photogenic dishes of the Very Large Array aim skywards as the setting Sun casts shadows across the sky.

If these were optical telescopes I could write that the telescopes were getting ready for a night of sky viewing. But radio telescopes can observe day and night.

Still, there is something magical about catching any type of telescope in action as the Sun sets and night falls. Here, the last beams of sunlight coming from the west illuminate the dishes, while dark shadows – crepuscular rays – cast by clouds converge toward the anti-Sun point in the east.

As part of my trek around New Mexico this past week, I shot this on Sunday, March 17, about an hour before I took the image of Comet PANSTARRS over the VLA dishes – for that image I was east of the array looking back to the west and to the comet.

But for this image I was at one of the public access areas, standing under one of the dishes, looking east.

At first, all the dishes were aimed up to the zenith, stowed I assume due to the high winds that were blowing all afternoon. But then, right on cue as I began shooting, all the dishes began to move in unison. The dishes first aimed toward me, then turned to aim up to the south, as here. It was an amazing dance to watch. It gave me goosebumps. And tears.

There is likely no more iconic image of our exploration of the universe from Earth than this array of antennas listening for the faintest signals from deep space – not alien radio programs, but the natural signals emitted by atoms and molecules where stars are forming and dying.

March 18, 2013

The Moon Meets Jupiter and the Hyades

On Sunday night, March 17, the waxing Moon came very close to Jupiter and the Hyades star cluster for one of the best conjunctions of the year.

This was certainly a night to remember. Minutes after I took the images for this shot, I took the frames for the Comet over the VLA image in the previous post. Here, I caught the Moon shining just below Jupiter (you can see a couple of its moons as well) and just above the Hyades star cluster and the bright yellow star Aldebaran at the bottom of the frame. All are set in the deep blue of twilight.

This is a high dynamic range (HDR) stack of seven exposures ranging from 6 seconds to 1/13 second, to capture the huge range in brightness from the sunlit Moon to the faint stars. Even so, the daylit side of the Moon remains overexposed. But the “dark side of the Moon” lit by Earthshine shows up well. A 135mm telephoto frames the field much as binoculars would show it.

This night recalled a similar evening on April 10, 1997, when Comet Hale-Bopp appeared low in the northwest, much as PANSTARRS is now, and the Moon actually passed in front of Aldebaran. An aurora display also broke loose that night, but not so last night – they are unlikely from New Mexico, though some northern lights were seen the night before from as far south as Colorado.

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