Alan Dyer – Page 5 – The Amazing Sky

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.

– Alan, May 19, 2013 / © 2103 Alan Dyer

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.

March 17, 2013

Comet PANSTARRS Over the VLA

Comet PANSTARRS hovers in the twilight above the many moonlit dishes of the VLA radio telescope.

I shot this earlier this evening, on Sunday, March 17, on an evening trek out to the VLA (Very Large Array) near Socorro, New Mexico. Light from the nearly quarter Moon high in the sky illuminates the landscape and rims the 27 dishes of the VLA, the radio telescope that has starred in many movies over the years. The comet appears in deep twilight, here with the colours accentuated. Fortunately, the array was arranged in its most compact formation – at times the dishes can be spread out over many miles.

For this shot I took two exposures moments apart: one tracked for 25 seconds for the sky and comet to ensure pinpoint stars, and one untracked for 50 seconds for the ground, to ensure sharp ground detail. I combined them in Photoshop. I used the iPad app Photographer’s Ephemeris to seek out the location, on Highway 52, the public highway leading to the entrance road for the VLA. Lights from cars on the main Highway 60 across the high Plains of San Agustin streak at right.

The comet is becoming more photogenic as it climbs higher, despite the waxing Moon. A classic curving dust tail is now obvious in photos, though here I had the advantage of a very clear sky at a high altitude desert site. Viewing condition don’t get any better than this. Still, this comet will bear watching and shooting over the next month, no matter where you are in the northern hemisphere.

March 16, 2013

The Magnificent Milky Way

What an amazing area of sky – the centre of the Galaxy hovering over the Earth below.

This was the scene two mornings ago, on our last clear night in New Mexico. This is what’s in the morning sky now and in the evening sky later in July and August. This is the area around Scorpius and Sagittarius and their rich star clouds toward the centre of the Milky Way.

It looks like a scene from an alien planet. But it’s here on Earth, gazing thousands of lights years toward the galactic core.

Enjoy!

March 15, 2013

Orion and the Winter Triangle

The Milky Way runs through the middle of the Winter Triangle, three of the bright stars of the northern winter sky.

At right is the familiar pattern of Orion the Hunter. But if you take his shoulder star, the orange-looking Betelgeuse, you can form an equilateral triangle with Sirius below centre and Procyon at upper left. The trio are sometimes called the Winter Triangle. The pattern seems obvious here but with so many other bright stars in the winter sky, I’ve never found the pattern too obvious. But in this image I’ve chosen to nicely centre and frame the Triangle.

I’ve also increased the contrast and saturation to emphasize the wealth of nebulosity that fills this area of the Milky Way. Streamers seem to reach out from Orion and connect to the reddish Seagull Nebula above Sirius, and also to the round Rosette Nebula above centre. The background sky west of the Milky Way under Orion is filled with a faint red glow, in contrast to the neutral black sky east (left) of the Milky Way.

I shot this last night, from New Mexico, on our last good clear night on a week-long observathon. This is a stack of 5 exposures, each 8 minutes long, plus two other exposures shot through a diffusion filter to add the glows around stars. I used a 35mm lens and a filter-modified Canon 5D MkII camera, riding on an iOptron Skytracker tracking platform.

March 15, 2013

Celestial Scorpion in the Desert

This is one of the few constellations that looks like what it is supposed to be – a desert-dwelling scorpion.

This is Scorpius in his native habitat of the desert. Here, from the latitude of southern New Mexico, he is standing on end, his claws at top, his curving tail and stinger at bottom.

The bright yellow star is Antares, the heart of the scorpion, embedded in a colourful mix of magenta, yellow and blue nebulas. Scattered along the Milky Way in the tail of the scorpion you can see several magenta emission nebulas shining by the combined red and blue light of hydrogen atoms.

What I love about this area of sky is the lacework of dark foreground nebulas, and the contrast between the bright star clouds and dark lanes of stardust. At centre left is the Dark Horse, the darkest part of which also carries the name Pipe Nebula.

I shot this image this morning at about 5 a.m, in the hour before the sky brightened with dawn twilight. This is a stack of seven 3-minute exposures with a 35mm lens, including two exposures taken through a diffusion filter to add the accentuated star glows. The ground details come from just one of the exposures.

As it’s been all week, the location is the Painted Pony Resort in southwest New Mexico.

March 14, 2013

The Arch of the Milky Way

On March evenings the Milky Way arches overhead in a magnificent river of starlight.

This is the panoramic view we are getting every night this week at our astronomy retreat in New Mexico, as we gaze upwards to the northern winter Milky Way running across the sky from northwest to southeast, from Cassiopeia at right to Vela at left.

In the middle you can see the stars of Orion and his familiar Belt.

On March nights we are gazing outward, to objects farther out than we are from the centre of our Galaxy. This part of the Milky Way is dominated by stars and nebulas around the Orion complex several hundred light years away.

Above the main house a pillar of light rises from the western horizon and tapers out as it reaches the Milky Way high in the west. That’s the Zodiacal Light caused by sunlight reflecting off comet dust in the inner solar system. You need to be at a fairly dark site to see it, with no prominent urban sky glows to the west. But springtime is the best season for seeing the Zodiacal Light in the evening sky. From the latitude of New Mexico the Zodiacal Light rises almost straight up, perpendicular to the horizon. Here, Jupiter sits at the apex of the Zodiacal Light.

So this panorama includes the Earth, objects in our solar system (Jupiter and comet dust), and the distant stars and nebulas of the Milky Way Galaxy we live in.

For this scene I shot a panorama of 4 segments, each consisting of 2 images stacked for noise smoothing, and the segments stitched with Photoshop. Each frame was a 3-minute exposure with the Samyang 14mm lens at f/2.8. The camera was on a tracking platform, so it followed the sky during the 25 minutes or so it took for me to shoot the entire panorama. I reframed the camera between each segment to try to get the horizon and landscape horizontal and lined up as best I could from segment to segment.

The ground is from one frame out of each segment and is blurred slightly because the camera was tracking the sky. Despite shooting a moving target, Photoshop was still able to automatically assemble the frames into a seamless panorama that, in this case, covers about 250°. This was the first time I attempted such a tracked panorama. I was impressed that it worked!

March 13, 2013

A Comet and Earthlit Moon Amid the Stars

This was the scene tonight, March 13, as Comet PANSTARRS set over the mountains in deep twilight, with the waxing Moon hanging overhead.

The small comet sits low in the orange glow of twilight, where the Moon was last night when it was down beside the comet. Tonight, a day later, the Moon appeared much higher in the sky as it waxes toward first quarter Moon in another few days. Tonight it was a crescent with most of the dark part of the lunar disk lit by Earthshine. I took this shot just before the comet set behind the mountains, to get the sky as dark as possible and the exposure longer to bring out some stars in the deepening blue of twilight.

I took this from the Painted Pony Resort in New Mexico where about 15 of us are gathered for a week-long star party and dusk to dawn “observathon.”

Indeed, I have to get back outside to continue shooting the Milky Way. It is another stunningly perfect night under New Mexico skies.

March 13, 2013

Night of the Comet on a Desert Highway

Sometimes the best sky experiences just happen spontaneously. This was one of them – a night of the comet on a desert highway.

This was the scene at our impromptu roadside star party last night, north of the Painted Pony Resort in southwest New Mexico. About a dozen of us, mostly Canadians, gathered at a highway pull off to watch the unforgettable sight of the waxing crescent Moon setting alongside Comet PANSTARRS. You can see the comet to the left of the Moon in the background wide-field image, more or less as it appeared to the naked eye. But the real treat was the view through binoculars and my own small 80mm telescope. The series of closeups with a telephoto lens captures that view.

It was amazing to watch the comet tail and dark side of the Moon setting together as the last bits to disappear behind the mountains. All the while the winter stars and Milky Way were appearing overhead in a perfect sky, all on a mild desert night. A stunning astronomical experience.

Thank you PANSTARRS!

March 12, 2013

Comet PANSTARRS Spectacle — With the Waxing Moon

This was the night for Comet PANSTARRS! How often do we get to see a view like this, with a comet sitting beside a thin crescent Moon. Spectacular!

Again tonight, about a dozen visiting and resident Canadians gathered for a roadside star party north of Rodeo, New Mexico, to view the comet and Moon setting together over the Chiricahua Mountains. It was a stunning sight and made for a picture postcard image. The two set almost simultaneously, with the tail of the comet and “dark side of the Moon” lit by Earthshine the last to disappear behind notches in the mountain ridge.

And tonight, with the comet higher, it was visible to the naked eye for the first time, but only just – the sighting was made easier because you knew exactly where to look.

The Moon was just 3o+ hours old, so appeared as a very thin crescent. The entire disk of the Moon was visible, the rest lit by Earthshine, sunlight reflected off the Earth. In the clear New Mexico air, the Earthshine was easy to see even in the bright twilight. But adding in the comet made for a once-a-lifetime view.

As soon as they set together, we all cheered and applauded, almost like at an eclipse. It was a memorable night, the kind you always hope for from a comet. PANSTARRS performed tonight!

March 12, 2013

Sagittarius and Scorpius Rising

This is the view from early this morning as the centre of the Milky Way rises above the desert landscape of New Mexico.

Sagittarius (at centre) and Scorpius (at right) contain the rich starfields of the galactic core. To the eye this scene looks as if bright clouds are moving in to hide the stars, but in fact the glows are stars – clouds of stars forming the glowing bulge of the galactic core. Superimposed on the glowing core are lanes of dark interstellar dust, such as the silhouette of the Dark Horse prancing at centre, with lanes of dust flowing across the sky and converging onto yellow Antares, the heart of Scorpius right of centre.

I shot this before dawn this morning, March 12, from our site in southwest New Mexico. Skies were perfect.

This is a stack of five 5-minute exposures with the 24mm lens at f/2.8. A sixth exposure taken through a diffusion filter added the star glows to accentuate the bright stars and their colours. The foreground is from one exposure and has been processed to bring out the details, here lit only by starlight.

March 12, 2013

Comet PANSTARRS in Twilight

This was Comet PANSTARRS as it appeared Monday night, March 11, as it set over the Chiricahua Mountains.

Tonight we drove north, away from our New Mexico resort, to find a site overlooking lower hills to the west, in order the track the comet for longer as it set toward the horizon. Friends from Winnipeg joined us, and as the Sun set, three more cars pulled up with astronomers from the area all looking for the best vantage point for comet watching. We had an impromptu roadside comet party.

Even so, it was tough picking PANSTARRS out of the twilight and it was never naked eye. Pity this comet hasn’t blossomed, as a bright long tail would have been a beautiful sight in the sunset glow. However, it is what we had expected – a first time visitor from the Oort Cloud promising great things initially but never quite delivering on the promise. Still, we were all happy to see it and shoot it. This frame is one of 140 I took in time-lapse of the comet setting over the hills.

We have ideal conditions for comet viewing each night this week, unlike many in the northern hemisphere now. So our little group of Canadians in New Mexico are taking some satisfaction in knowing we’re seeing it, and many aren’t.

March 11, 2013March 11, 2013

Skies of Enchantment – Summer Milky Way Rising

If you lived here you’d be in astronomy paradise.

This is the summer Milky Way and galactic centre in Sagittarius and Scorpius rising before dawn early this morning. The setting is the Painted Pony Resort in New Mexico, and its adobe lodges.

There’s no more spectacular sight than this in the night sky, other than perhaps an all-sky aurora display. And they don’t get too many of those down here at 31° North in southern New Mexico.

This image is a stack of ten 3-minute exposures for the sky (to smooth out noise) but the ground is from just 2 of those exposures and is blurred because the camera was tracking the sky. Light from walkway lights, plus starlight itself, added just enough illumination to provide details in the foreground.

So to be clear – this is a real scene. The Milky Way has not been pasted onto a separate image of the foreground. However, colour and contrast have been boosted to bring out details your eye would not have seen had you been standing here early this morning in the frosty New Mexico night.

Again, as with my previous image taken earlier in the night, I used the new Samyang 14mm ultra-wide angle lens, at f/2.8. It works very well!

March 11, 2013March 11, 2013

Skies of Enchantment – Winter Milky Way Setting

In the land of enchantment, the winter Milky Way sets over our adobe house.

I’m in New Mexico, enjoying wonderfully clear skies. In the early evening the winter Milky Way runs north and south then turns to set over in the west, as it’s doing here, over the main house at the Painted Pony Resort near Rodeo, in southwest New Mexico.

Jupiter and the stars of Taurus are at upper right, and Orion is just right of centre. Above the house shine Sirius and the stars of Canis Major and Puppis. The area of red in the Milky Way just above the house is the massive Gum Nebula in Vela, an area of sky hidden from us in Canada.

For this image I combined a stack of five 5-minute tracked exposures taken with the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800 and 14mm Samyang lens wide open at f/2.8. The ground details are from two of the exposures.

This was a fabulous night with more to come this week.

March 10, 2013March 11, 2013

Comet PANSTARRS at Perihelion

Got it! After a few days of cloud, the skies cleared perfectly tonight for our first look at Comet PANSTARRS.

This is the comet on March 10, the day it rounded the Sun at perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. The comet, which came from the Oort Cloud, is now on its way back to where it came from. But for the next few days, it will be at its best in our evening sky in the northern hemisphere. Friends down under in the southern hemisphere have been enjoying views of the comet for the last two weeks, but the comet has now moved far enough north it has entered our northern hemisphere skies.

The view is actually best from higher latitudes but I’m here at latitude 31° N, in southwestern New Mexico, seeking the clearest skies for the comet. We got them tonight. This view is of the comet about 7° up, just above the rim of the Chiricahua Mountains to the west of us, in Arizona.

The comet will climb higher over the next few days, with a prime night on March 12 when the waxing Moon appears near the comet.

March 2, 2013

The Wide-Angle Winter Sky

Orion and his friends are beginning their descent into the evening sky, signalling the welcome end of winter and the coming of spring.

I shot this last night from home, in a scene similar to some earlier posts, such as Winter Stars Rising. But the difference here is that I’m using a new lens, testing it for the first time. I wasn’t really after a “keeper” shot, but I think this one turned out pretty well!

The lens is the Samyang (aka Rokinon) 14mm f/2.8, an ultra-wide angle lens that sells for a bargain price, a fraction of the cost of name brand 14mm lenses. The reason is that this lens dispenses with all the automatic features and electronic communication and is a classic manual lens, just like we used to recommend people buy for astrophotography in the old film days. For shooting stars you don’t need autofocus or having the aperture stay wide-open until you take the photo. So we’re not missing much employing a no-frills manual lens like the Korean-made Samyang series – they make well-respected 24mm and 35mm lenses as well.

Star images are quite sharp across the very wide field, with very good control over coma at the corners. Stopping the lens down to f/4 does sharpen them up but the lens is perfectly usable at f/2.8, as it is here. The big issue is the extreme amount of vignetting — darkening of the corners of the frame. In star shots, we often have to boost the contrast a lot to make the shot presentable, and that increases the visibility of any vignetting, making the photo look like it was taken through a porthole. For this shot I “flattened” the image by applying very generous levels (almost maximum) anti-vignetting both in Adobe Camera Raw (at the start of processing) and again in Photoshop (at the end of processing) with its Lens Correction routine. The final result looks very good and natural I think.

Another drawback to the Samyang manual lenses is that they feed no information to the camera about what lens is attached. The “EXIF” data that the camera records lacks any info on aperture and focal length. So in the photo info at left (which is picked off the image automatically by WordPress), you’ll see the lens listed as a 50mm and with no aperture specified.

So the verdict? The Samyang/Rokinon 14mm is a very nice lens for wide-angle piggyback shooting (like this stack of five 5-minute tracked exposures), and for nightscapes and time-lapse work. A bargain at ~ $360. Recommended!

February 15, 2013

Flying Through a Moonlit Winter Night

Tonight the Space Station flew out of the west and overhead as it faded into the shadow of the Earth.

Because tonight the ISS was coming up high into the north, almost directly overhead, I used a fish-eye lens to shoot the entire sky, and took three exposures, each 90 seconds with the camera tracking the stars.

The bright Moon is at right, but despite its light the Milky Way still shows up. The Space Station faded into sunset just as it crossed the Milky Way.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is on board, about to take command at the next crew change. He’s been tweeting lots of comments and photos from space. Check him out at @Cmdr_Hadfield.

February 14, 2013

A Luminous Starfield

The Starfish and the Flaming Star combine to create a rich star field in the Charioteer.

I shot this last week, using a favourite small refractor that takes in a generous field of view for a telescope. In this case, it frames the star cluster at left called the Starfish Cluster, or better known as Messier 38. At right the large number 7-shaped patch of nebulosity is the Flaming Star Nebula, known by its catalog number as IC 405. At bottom, the nameless companion nebulas are IC 417 at left and IC 410 at bottom centre.

Of note is the colourful grouping of six stars at right called the Little Fish. It’s not a proper star cluster but an asterism, a chance alignment of stars that happens to look like something imaginative. David Ratledge presents a nice list and photo gallery of similar whimsical asterisms at his Deep-Sky.co.uk website.

The entire field is a rich hunting ground for the eyepiece or camera. You can find it these nights, in winter from the northern hemisphere, straight overhead in the evening, in the middle of Auriga the Charioteer.

For this portrait I shot and stacked eight 7-minute exposures at ISO 800 using a filter-modified Canon 6D on my TMB 92mm apo refractor at f/4.8.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

February 12, 2013

Mercury and the Razor-Thin Moon

This was the sky scene Sunday night, February 10, as an ultra-thin Moon entered the evening sky, providing me with a “personal best” for sighting a young Moon.

I’ve had to highlight and annotate the subjects here but all the players were obvious in binoculars. Only Mercury, usually the most elusive planet, was obvious to the naked eye. Below it shone dimmer Mars, here embedded in some cloud.

But the real catch of the night was the 18-hour-old crescent Moon, shimmering low in the red twilight. It appears as a razor-thin crescent, magnified in the inset. Sighting any Moon younger than 24 hours old is considered a find, the all-time record being a Moon about 14 hours old. I’m happy with an 18-hour catch!

On Sunday night conditions were nearly ideal, despite the clouds, with the Moon angled about as far from the Sun as it could be from my northern latitude, positioned directly above the sunset point. You can tell that because the crescent, which must be oriented toward the Sun, appears nearly horizontal.

This is the New Moon that also signals the start of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake. So 迎春接福 !

February 11, 2013

Commander Hadfield Sailing Through the Stars

Here’s looking back at you Commander Hadfield! Here is our Canadian astronaut sailing into the Milky Way.

Since he launched to the International Space Station in December Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has been tweeting many photos of places in Canada that he sees passing by his window 400 kilometres below. With the Space Station now entering our evening sky in western Canada, I can return the favour and photograph his home in space traveling among the stars. This night he flew through Orion and into the winter Milky Way.

This was the scene Sunday night, February 10, in a pass of the Space Station low across the south starting at 7:14 p.m. MST. The exposure was four minutes, long enough to just capture the entire pass from west to east, right to left in this image. At left, the trail of the Space Station fades out as the ISS entered Earth’s shadow and into night.

The image also captures the Milky Way at left and the Zodiacal Light rising from the last vestiges of blue twilight at right. Jupiter is the brightest object above centre. For the next two weeks we’ll be enjoying nightly passes of the ISS with our Canadian astronaut on board.

February 10, 2013

See, That’s the Orion Nebula!

What a hardy bunch we are in Canada, braving winter weather to see Orion and company.

A well-bundled group of sky fans partakes in an impromptu tour of Orion and his famous nebula.

I shot this scene last night, February 9, at the first of a series of monthly stargazing nights at the local university research observatory, the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. About 120 people and volunteers gathered to take in the sights of the winter sky, as best they could as transient clouds permitted. Inside, speakers presented talks themed to the Chinese New Year, which is governed by the timing of the New Moon each year. As this was a New Moon night, people were able to stargaze under reasonably dark skies to see deep-sky sights such as the Orion Nebula.

Want to know where it is? An astronomy club member points it out rather handily with one of the best tools astronomers have for public outreach, a bright green laser pointer. Controversial and dangerous in the wrong hands, when used responsibly these laser pointers are wonderful for conducting sky tours.

As a side note, this is a 3-second exposure with a new Canon 6D camera at ISO 8000, yet the photo shows very little noise. In just 3 seconds, the Milky Way is beginning to show up! I could have gone to previously unthinkable speeds of ISO 12000+ and still had a presentable shot. This will be a superb camera for nightscapes and available light shots.

February 9, 2013

The Subtle Glow of Comet Dust

Out of the skyglow from lights and the remains of twilight rises a tapering pyramid of light. It’s one of the night sky’s most subtle sights for the naked eye.

This is the Zodiacal Light, and I’ve been trying to capture it in the evening sky from home for a number of years. Last night was a good night for it. The sky was very transparent, for the first couple of hours at least. An ultra-wide angle lens allowed me to capture the Light in context with the wider sky, towering out of the southwest at right, reaching up to the Pleiades and Jupiter high in the centre of the frame. The Milky Way is at left. Everyone knows the Milky Way but the Zodiacal Light is less famous.

It’s visible only in the hour or two after sunset or before sunrise. Late winter and spring are the best times to see it in the evening sky. That’s when the ecliptic – the plane of the solar system where the planets lie – is tipped up at its highest angle above the horizon putting it above obscuring haze. The Zodiacal Light lies along the ecliptic because it is part of our solar system, not in our atmosphere. It is sunlight reflected off dust orbiting in the inner solar system that’s been cast off over thousands of years by comets passing through. It is brightest closest to the Sun and fades out at greater angles away from the Sun. Thus its tapering appearance in my sky as the photo shows, very much as my eye saw it.

It takes a good night at a dark site to see the Zodiacal Light. But take a look at the next dark of the Moon. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to see once you know what to look for.

February 8, 2013February 9, 2013

The Beautiful Belt of Orion

Everyone knows the Belt of Orion, but only the camera reveals the wealth of colours that surround it.

I shot this Friday night, February 8, under very clear sky conditions.

While I used a telescope, it had a short enough focal length, about 480mm, that the field took in all three stars in the Belt: from left to right, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. All are hot blue stars embedded in colourful clouds. The most famous is the Horsehead Nebula, running down from Alnitak at left. Above the star is the salmon-coloured Flame Nebula. All manner of bits of blue and cyan nebulas dot the field, their colour coming from the blue starlight the dust reflects.

Dimmer dust clouds more removed from nearby stars glow with browns and yellows. At left, a large swath of sky is obscured by gas and dust simmering in dull red. The entire field is peppered with young blue stars.

It is certainly one of the most vibrant regions of sky, though only long exposures and image processing bring out the colours.

This is another test shot with a new Canon 6D that has had its sensor filter modified to transmit more of the deep red light of these types of nebulas. The camera works very well indeed!

February 8, 2013February 9, 2013

A Crisp Winter’s Night Under the Stars

It was crisp and frosty night filled with the bright stars of winter, and the Milky Way.

This was the sky from my backyard on Thursday, February 7, with Orion and his friends shining due south. It is a “fish-eye” shot taking in all of the sky from horizon to horizon. South is at bottom, north to the top. West is at right, east to the left.

The Milky Way runs from northwest, at top right, to southeast, at bottom left. When we look at this section of the Milky Way we are looking in the direction opposite the galactic core, toward the outer arms of our Galaxy.

Jupiter is the brightest “star” in the image, shining in Taurus. Rising out of the sky glow from towns to the west of me is the pillar of light called the Zodiacal Light. I think you can follow it stretching all the way across the sky from right to left (west to east) where it then becomes a subtle bright patch in the sky well east of the Milky Way. That’s the Gegenschein, a glow of light exactly opposite the Sun. It and the Zodiacal Light are caused by sunlight reflecting off comet dust in the inner solar system.

A night when you can see the Zodiacal Light and Gegenschein – they were visible to the unaided eye – is a good night indeed. Too bad this one was spoiled by some cloud and haze, reflecting the toxic yellow glow of ever-intruding sodium vapour lights.

Silhouetted in the sky glow at right is one of my telescopes, with camera #2 dutifully taking a closeup image of Orion’s Belt. That picture will be the subject of tomorrow’s blog!

February 7, 2013February 10, 2013

Snapshots of Starlife

This one image frames examples of both the beginning and end points of a star’s life.

I shot this last night, February 6, 2013, capturing a field in the constellation of Gemini the twins. At upper right is the showpiece star cluster known as Messier 35. It’s a collection of fairly young stars still hanging around together after forming from a cloud of interstellar gas tens of millions of years ago. M35 lies about 2,800 light years from Earth, on the other side of the spiral arm we live in. Just below M35 you can see another smaller and denser cluster. That’s NGC 2158, about five times farther away from us, thus its smaller apparent size. Both are objects that represent the early stages of a star’s life.

At lower left is an object known as the Jellyfish Nebula, for obvious reasons. The official name is IC 443. It’s the expanding remains of a star that blew up as a supernova anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000 years ago. What’s left of the star’s core can still be detected as a spinning neutron star. You need a radio telescope to see that object, but the blasted remains of the star’s outer layers can be seen through a large backyard telescope as a shell of gas. It is expanding into the space between stars – the interstellar medium – ploughing into other gas clouds. The shockwave from its collision with other nebulas may trigger those clouds to collapse and form clusters of new stars. And so it goes in the Galaxy.

For this portrait of stellar lifestyles, I used a 92mm apochromatic refractor and a new Canon 6D camera, one that has had its sensor filter modified to accept a greater range of deep red light emitted by hydrogen nebulas. The image is actually a stack of 12 exposures with an accumulated exposure time of 80 minutes.

February 7, 2013February 9, 2013

Constellation of the Queen

After the 7 stars of the Big Dipper and the 3 stars of Orion’s Belt, these 5 stars are likely the most well-known in the northern sky.

These are the 5 bright stars of Cassiopeia the queen, better known simply as “the W” in the sky. Her five stars come in a range of colours, from blue giant Segin at upper left to yellow giant Shedar at lower right.

Scattered around Cassiopeia you can also spot at least one bright red nebula, the “Pacman Nebula,” plus a faint patch of purple nebulosity just above central Navi, the middle star of the W also known as Gamma Cassiopeiae. A few wisps of fainter reddish nebulosity and lanes of dark dust wind around the queen’s celestial throne. The left side of the W – the back of the throne – is also home to several clumps of stars, nice open clusters suitable for binoculars or any telescope.

I shot this portrait of the Queen on Wednesday night, February 6, on a cool and frosty winter night in my backyard. For the set of 8 images that went into this stack I used a new tracking device, the iOptron SkyTracker. It’s a nifty little battery-powered tracker, compact but very solid. And it tracks very well. For this portrait I used a 135mm telephoto lens, and most, though not all, shots were very well tracked with pinpoint stars. A few frames showed a bit of trailing, not unusual for small portable tracking mounts. At $400 the little iOptron SkyTracker is a great accessory for anyone wanting to shoot constellations and the Milky Way with wide-angle to telephoto lenses.

February 3, 2013February 9, 2013

The Natural Naked-Eye Milky Way

In this image I’ve tried to render the Milky Way in a view that simulates what you see with your unaided eyes.

The result is a celestial portrait in subtle shades of black and white.

This is a photo mosaic, but processed contrary to the usual methods – eliminating colour rather than enhancing it, and reducing contrast rather than boosting it. The result is a view that I think quite nicely matches what your eyes see, though certainly from a dark site. And in this case, you would need to be in the southern hemisphere to see this sweep of the Milky Way, from Aquila at left, to the Southern Cross at right, with the bright star clouds around the centre of the Galaxy in Sagittarius and Scorpius in the middle.

I’ve removed colours except for the muted colours of stars. And I’ve tried to render the stars with an intensity and dynamic range that the eye sees but that is often lost in long exposures.

The dark lanes of dust seen here really do look like this under dark skies. The nearby Coal Sack next to the Southern Cross does look a little darker than the rest of the sky. This view also captures another effect you can see in the real sky – the brighter sky below the Milky Way plane beneath Sagittarius and Aquila – there are more stars there, which make the background sky brighter than above the Milky Way plane (along the top of the photo) where the sky is permeated by dark obscuring dust.

This scene also frames the “dark Emu” – the shape drawn in the dark lanes that looks like a flightless emu in the sky. It’s an important “constellation” in Aboriginal mythology in Australia. The emu’s head is the Coal Sack at far right, her neck the long dark lane curving up through Centaurus and Lupus, and her tail the dark lanes at left in Ophiuchus, Scutum and Aquila.

I shot the original images for this panoramic mosaic in Chile in May 2011. You can see the full colour version in my “Milky Way Mosaic” post from 2011. The colours are wonderful. But there’s something enthralling about “capturing” the view more as your eyes – and mind – remember it.

January 27, 2013February 9, 2013

Winter Sky in Moonlight

Earlier this week I shot a similar scene with the Moon in the photo, when it was near Jupiter. This is the same sky but 5 days later, on January 26, with the Moon now out of the picture, but serving to light up the landscape.

This is the old house on my property that serves as an occasional foreground for test nightscapes. In this case, I was testing my veteran Canon 5D MkII camera against a new Canon 6D. This shot with the 5D MkII had the best arrangement of clouds and stars and works as a decent enough shot on its own.

You can see Orion dodging the clouds, with Sirius at left, and Aldebaran, Jupiter and the Pleiades at upper right.

So what of the tests? Initial impressions are that as far as noise is concerned (always the bane of astrophotographers) the new full-frame Canon 6D improves upon the 5-year old Canon 5D MkII by a factor of two. Noise looks to be about one f-stop better in the 6D, no doubt due to its new Digic V on-board processor.

What this means is:

• Images taken with the 6D at ISO 6400 have a similar level of noise as do images taken at ISO 3200 with the 5D MkII. ISO 3200 images with the 6D look like ISO 1600 images with the 5D MkII, and so on.

• So, if you were happy with shooting at ISO 1600 with the 5D MkII before, you could now shoot at ISO 3200 with the new 6D and get similar results, but with the added benefit of being able to cut your exposure times in half, always a nice thing to do.

• Or conversely, you could continue to shoot with the Canon 6D at ISO 1600 for the same exposure times as before but get shots with much less noise in them. Always a good thing, too!

It’s great to see camera state-of-the-art advancing.

January 21, 2013February 9, 2013

Moon and Jupiter Amid the Winter Stars

The Moon lights up a sparkling snowscape on the night it was close to Jupiter, as Orion and the winter stars rise.

The Moon is the bright and overexposed glow at upper right. Look carefully and you can just make out Jupiter above the Moon, almost lost in its glare. Below shines Orion, with Sirius the Dog Star just coming up above the distant trees. The Pleiades, at top above the Moon, complete this winter sky scene from Monday, January 21, 2013.

I’m glad I didn’t have to go far to shoot it, just 20 feet out the front door. Standing there for just 15 minutes was a chore, with a wicked east wind blowing in -18° C temperatures. This was a night that would normally fall below my threshold of tolerance for winter observing. But with the Moon so close to Jupiter it was worth a little pain for the gain of a neat winter sky portrait.

The image is a composite of a long and short exposure, in order to capture Jupiter so close to the Moon which, in a single long exposure, would have overexposed so much its light would have swamped Jupiter.

January 21, 2013February 9, 2013

The Moon Meets Jupiter

The cool blue of this scene fits the night – a bitterly cold winter night as the gibbous Moon passed below Jupiter.

This was the view as the sky got dark on Monday, January 21, 2013 with a close conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter underway. The Moon was closer to Jupiter later in the evening but I wanted to shoot it at sunset to capture the duo before for the sky got too dark and the Moon too bright and prone to overexposure. Even so, to capture the scene as your binocular-aided eyes saw it, I combined 4 different exposures for an “HDR” stack.

This is the closest we in North America will see the Moon by Jupiter in a darkened sky until 2026. But just next month those in southern Australia get to see a rare occultation, or “eclipse” of Jupiter by the Moon. It doesn’t get any closer than that!

January 14, 2013February 9, 2013

Timor Cottage R.I.P.

Word has reached me that my favourite observing site in the world is gone.

Over the weekend, devastating bush fires swept through Warrumbungles National Park and surrounding areas near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. Several dozen homes were lost. Some were homes of friends I’ve made there in my many visits to the area in the last 12 years. Among the buildings burned and lost, Timor Cottage, the rental cottage where I stayed in 2010 and in 2012. Previous posts have extolled the virtues of this site. I’m told it is now ashes. Ironically, just last week I confirmed my booking for it, for a stay in early 2014.

Fortunately, all residents were evacuated safely. No one lost a life, just property.

The nearby Siding Spring Observatory managed to survive the fires largely intact, due in no small part to the fire suppression safeguards implemented in the last 10 years since the fires of January 18, 2003 that destroyed Australia’s other major optical astronomy site, the Mt. Stromlo Observatory. Some lessons were learned. However, they did not help the people living near by, many of whom were Observatory employees. It was, and is, a wonderful astronomy community along Timor Road. I wish them the best in their efforts to rebuild their homes and their lives.

It is life in unforgiving Australia — one month paradise, the next hell on Earth.

January 11, 2013February 9, 2013

An Orion Portrait from Alberta

He’s certainly the sky’s most photogenic mythological figure. Here’s my full-length portrait of Orion the hunter, captured from Alberta.

I’ve shot him many times before but this was a new combination of gear: the Canon 60Da camera and the Sigma 50mm lens, nicely framing the hunter in portrait format. This version of Orion isn’t as deep as the one I took last month from Australia. But skies were darker there, and I used my filter-modified Canon 5D MkII for his Oz portrait, a camera which picks up more faint red nebulosity than does the 60Da, Canon’s own specialized DSLR camera for astronomy. The 60Da does do a very good job though, much better than would a normal DSLR.

For this shot, as I do for many constellation images, I layered in exposures taken through a soft-focus filter, the Kenko Softon, to enlarge and “fuzzify” the stars! It really helps bring out their colours, contrasting cool, orange Betelgeuse with the hot blue-white stars in the rest of Orion.

I shot this January 4 on a fine clear winter night, the classic hunting ground for Orion.

January 6, 2013February 9, 2013

Winter Stars Rising

Yes, it’s cold out there, but a clear evening away from city lights this week – or this winter – will reward you with the sight of a rising star-filled sky.

This is the winter sky of the northern hemisphere, rising above a snowy prairie landscape, in a shot I took Sunday night, January 6, 2013. The sky is populated by a ream of bright stars and constellations, anchored by Orion, just below centre. You can see his three Belt stars pointing down to Sirius, just peering above the horizon in the glow of a distant town. Orion’s Belt points up to Aldebaran, the V-shaped Hyades star cluster, and bright Jupiter (the brightest object in the scene, above centre), all in Taurus. Above Jupiter is the Pleiades star cluster.

The Milky Way runs down the sky from Auriga to Canis Major. This week, January 6 to 13, is a good week to see the winter Milky Way, as it’s New Moon and the sky is dark.

In this scene the camera was looking southeast about 9 p.m. Sirius has just risen. By midnight the Dog Star shines due south. I used a 15mm wide-angle lens to take in the entire sweep of the winter sky from horizon to zenith. This is a stack of four 4-minute exposures, though the landscape is from just one of the frames, to minimize the blurring caused by the camera tracking the sky. Some clouds moving in add the streaks on either side of the frame. It was a wonderful sky, while it lasted!

And I’m pleased to note that this is my 250th blog post since beginning AmazingSky.net two years ago in early 2011. I hope you have enjoyed the sky tours.

January 5, 2013February 9, 2013

Jupiter Amid the Clusters of Taurus

Look up on a clear night this season (winter for us in the northern hemisphere) and you’ll see a bright object shining in Taurus the bull. That’s Jupiter.

This year Jupiter sits in a photogenic region of the sky, directly above the stars of the Hyades star cluster and yellow Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. Above and to the west (right) of Jupiter is the blue Pleiades star cluster.

Over the course of January 2013 you’ll be able to see Jupiter move a little further west each night (to the right in this photo) away from Aldebaran and toward the Pleiades. Jupiter will stop its retrograde motion on January 30. After that it treks eastward to again pass above the Hyades and Aldebaran (returning to where it is now) in early March.

Jupiter’s proximity to Aldebaran and the Hyades makes it easy to follow its retrograde loop over the next few weeks. It’s an easy phenomenon to watch, but explaining it took society hundreds of years and the ultimate in paradigm shifts in thinking, from the self-important arrogance that Earth – and we – were the centre of the universe, to the Sun-centered view of space, with Earth demoted to being just one planet orbiting our star.

I took this image Friday night, January 4, from home as my first astrophoto upon returning to Canada from Australia. It’s a combination of two sets of images: one taken “straight & unfiltered” and one taken through a soft-focus filter to add the glows around the stars and central, brilliant Jupiter. I then blended the filtered images onto the normal images in Photoshop with the Lighten blend mode.

December 31, 2012February 9, 2013

A Truly Amazing Sky — A New Year’s Gift

As we end 2012 and start a new year, I wish everyone a very happy 2013 and leave you with this view of a very amazing sky.

This is a 360° panorama of the Milky Way over Timor Cottage on a very clear night in mid-December in New South Wales, Australia. May all your skies be as wonderful and as inspiring as this in the coming year.

Indeed, we have some potentially remarkable sights to look forward to, with the prospects of two bright comets in 2013: Comet PANSTARRS in March and Comet ISON in November and December.

Let’s hope for more amazing skies in 2013. Keep looking up!

December 28, 2012December 28, 2012

Zooming into Canis Major – #3

In the third instalment in my trilogy of Canis Major zooms, I present this close-up of another neat nebula in the Great Hunting Dog, called Thor’s Helmet.

You can tell just by the colour that this is a different type of nebula than the typical red hydrogen gas clouds, such as the Seagull Nebula of my previous post. Yes, this is glowing gas but this nebula originates from a different source than most. Rather than being a site where stars form this is a nebula surrounding an aging star, a massive superhot star that is shedding shells of gas in an effort to lose weight – or mass as we should say.

Intense winds from the star blow the gas into bubbles, and cause it to fluoresce in shades of cyan. The central star is one of a rare stellar type called a Wolf-Rayet star, named for the pair of French astronomers who discovered this class of star in the 19th century. WR stars are likely candidates to explode as supernovas.

This particular Wolf-Rayet nebula, catalogued as NGC 2359, has a complex set of intersecting bubbles that, through the eyepiece, do take on the appearance of a Viking helmet with protruding horns, like you see in the Bugs Bunny cartoon operas! It’s a neat object to look at with as big a telescope as you can muster. And, as you can see, it’s rather photogenic as well, embedded in a rich field with faint star cluster companions.

December 28, 2012December 28, 2012

Zooming into Canis Major – #2

Zooming in closer yet again to the field in Canis Major I showed in my previous post, I’m now framing the large nebula known as the Seagull. Perhaps you can see him flying through the stars.

The catalog number for this object is IC 2177, but the bright round nebula at right (the head of the Seagull?) is object #1 in the catalog of Australian astronomer Colin Gum. It’s also object #2327 in the familiar NGC listing that all stargazers use.

Some of this nebulosity is just visible through a small telescope, especially with the aid of a nebula filter than accentuates the emission lines – the colours – emitted by these kinds of glowing gas clouds.

This is certainly a photogenic field, with a nice mix of pinks, blues, purples and deep reds.

I used my 4-inch (105mm aperture) f/5.8 apo refractor to shoot this target, so the field is fairly narrow, framing what a telescope would show at very low power.

(FYI – The image info listed at left, automatically picked off the image’s EXIF data by the WordPress blog software, fails to record the focal length of the optics properly, as I didn’t use a standard camera lens but a telescope the camera doesn’t know about.)

I’ve been after a good shot of this object for some years, but haven’t been successful until this past observing run in Australia, in December 2012. While I can see and shoot the Seagull Nebula from home in Alberta, it’s always very low in my home sky. From Australia the challenge was framing the field with the Seagull overhead at the zenith. Just looking through the camera aimed straight up took some ground grovelling effort. Plus avoiding having the telescope hit the tripod as it tracked the object over the hour or so worth of exposures – typically 4 to 5 that I then stack to reduce noise.

December 28, 2012December 28, 2012

Zooming into Canis Major – #1

My last post featured a wide view of Canis Major. Here, we zoom in closer to one of the most interesting regions in that constellation, filled with nebulas and clusters.

The prominent red arc is the Seagull Nebula, aka IC 2177. Above and to the right of the Seagull is a clump of stars called Messier 50, which lies over the border in the constellation of Monoceros the Unicorn.

At the lower left edge of the frame sits a pair of dissimilar star clusters, Messier 46 (the left one) and Messier 47 (the right one). M46 is a dense rich cluster of stars while M47 is brighter but looser and more scattered.

Several other non-Messier clusters punctuate the field. This is a great area of sky to explore with binoculars.

Just below centre you might see a small green-blue patch. That’s the nebula called Thor’s Helmet, or NGC 2359, a fine telescopic object.

If you get a clear night this season when the Moon is out of the way and you can head to a dark sky, Canis Major, the Hunting Dog, is a great hunting ground for deep-sky fans.

As the data at left shows, I shot this with a 135mm telephoto lens, giving a field of view similar to what binoculars would show.

December 27, 2012December 27, 2012

Canis Major and the Dog Star

Shining in the southern sky these nights are the stars of Canis Major, the big hunting dog of Orion the Hunter. Among them is the famous Dog Star, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

Can you see a dog outlined in stars? Sirius marks his head – or it is sometimes depicted as a jewel in his collar. His hind legs and tail are at the bottom of the frame.

I shot this earlier this month from Australia, where Sirius and Canis Major stand high overhead. From northern latitudes you can see these stars due south low in the sky about midnight. Sirius is hard to miss, often sparkling through many colours as our atmosphere distorts its light. But as the photo shows, it is really a hot blue-white star. While it is intrinsically a bright star, much of its brilliance in our sky comes from its proximity, only 9 light years away from us.

For this portrait of the celestial canine I used a 50mm “normal” lens. The atmosphere provided some natural haze this night, to add the glows around the stars accentuating their colours.

This area of sky also contains several nebulas, notably the red arc of the Seagull Nebula to the left of Sirius. Below Sirius you can also see the star cluster Messier 41, a good target for binoculars.

Toward the left edge of the frame you can see a pair of star clusters, Messier 46 and Messier 47, two other excellent binocular objects in the Milky Way, which runs down the frame to the left of Canis Major. The dog is just climbing out of the Milky Way after a swim in this river of stars.

December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

The Christmas Tree Cluster

The current night sky contains another seasonal sight, a cluster of stars called the Christmas Tree Cluster. Turn the image upside down and you might see it!

The bright star lies at the base of the Christmas tree and at the bottom of a tall triangle of blue and yellow stars that outlines – or decorates – the tree. At the top of the tree sits the dark Cone Nebula. The Tree also encompasses a bright blue dusty nebula reflecting the light of nearby stars and swirls of pink glowing hydrogen. At right sits a rich cluster of stars dimmed yellow by intervening dust. At bottom (south) in this photo you can also see a small V-shaped object. That’s Hubble’s Variable Nebula, a dust cloud studied by Edwin Hubble, one that varies in intensity with fluctuations in the main star embedded at its tip.

This rich area of sky lies above (north of) the subject of my previous post, the Rosette Nebula in the constellation of Monoceros the Unicorn. Very little of this is visible to the eye. The magic of photography is how it coaxes detail out of the sky that the eye alone cannot see.

December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

A Cosmic Wreath in the Sky

This is the Rosette Nebula, a celestial wreath 5,000 light years in the northern winter sky.

It is one of the most photogenic of nebulas, but is barely visible to even an aided eye as a ghostly grey arc of light around the central star cluster. Winds from the group of hot stars at the centre of the Rosette are blowing a hole in the cloud, creating the wreath-like shape of the Rosette.

While I shot this earlier this month from Australia, the Rosette lies far enough north in the constellation of Monoceros that northerners can see this cosmic wreath on any dark and clear winter night. It makes a beautiful decoration in our holiday sky.

Happy holidays to all!

December 19, 2012December 19, 2012

The Down Under Waxing Moon

To northern eyes this looks like an old Moon in the morning sky, but this is really a young Moon in the evening sky – seen from Australia.

This was the waxing crescent Moon a few nights ago in the early evening sky. Because I took this from a latitude of 30° south, the Moon is turned over almost 90° from the way northern hemisphere viewers would see it from Canada or the northern U.S.

For this image, I shot ten exposures from 1/30s to 15 seconds and merged them into one “high dynamic range” composite using Photomatix Pro software. The result is an image with detail in both the bright sunlit crescent and in the dark side of the Moon visible here lit by Earthshine, sunlight reflected off the Earth. The resulting “HDR image” compressed the wide range of brightness into one image, to show the Moon the way your eye would see it but that photo technology is still not capable of recording in one exposure.

December 18, 2012December 18, 2012

The Colourful Clouds of Orion – #2

Swirls of pink, red and blue nebulas surround the Belt and Sword of Orion the Hunter.

For this closeup of Orion I used a 135mm telephoto lens under dark Australian skies to grab long exposures to reveal not only the bright Orion Nebula at bottom in Orion’s Sword, but also the Horsehead Nebula (below the left star of Orion’s Belt), Barnard’s Loop (at left) and the mass of red nebulosity between the Loop and the Belt & Sword. At right is a faint blue nebula reflecting the light of the hot blue stars in the area.

This is a gorgeous area of sky for the camera, but only the brightest nebulas, the tip of the cosmic iceberg, are visible to the eye even with the aid of a telescope.

December 18, 2012December 18, 2012

The Colourful Clouds of Orion – #1

The constellation Orion is a hotbed of star formation, from masses of colourful clouds.

I shot this portrait of Orion the Hunter a few nights ago in Australia where Orion stands upside down compared to our view from up north. But I’ve turned around the photo here to put him right side up with head at the top and feet at the bottom.

The three stars in a row in the middle are his famous Belt stars. Below shines the nebulas that outline his Sword, among them the Orion Nebula, the subject of an earlier post last week.

The giant arc is Barnard’s Loop, a bubble blown in space by the winds from hot new stars. The bubble around Orion’s head at top is a similar interstellar bubble. Most stars here are blue-white and hot, but the distinctively orange star is the red giant Betelgeuse, a good candidate for a supernova explosion.

Orion stands high in the sky at midnight these nights, summer here in Australia, but winter at home in Canada.

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012

Remains of a Star: The Vela Supernova Remnant

Amid a maze of glowing nebulas sits a tracery of magenta and cyan that was once a star.

This image takes in the Vela Supernova Remnant. You can see it as the lacework of gas in the centre of the field. Oddly enough, it sits in the middle of the vast Gum Nebula, the subject of my previous post, an object also thought to be a supernova remnant but one much older and closer. The Vela Supernova Remnant here likely comes from a supergiant star that exploded about 10,000 years ago. It, too, would have been quite a sight to the earliest of civilizations.

The field in the southern constellation of Vela also contains many other classic red and pink nebulas, but ones that are forming new stars, not the remains of dead ones. Most carry designations from astronomer Colin Gum’s catalog from the 1950s and have no numbers from the more familiar NGC or IC catalogs amateur stargazers refer to in their scanning of the skies. Yet, these Gum nebulas show up easily in photos.

I used a 135mm telephoto lens to take this image and it encompasses a field similar to what binoculars would frame. Except, it takes long exposure photos to show these nebulas. I looked last night at the Vela SNR with my 25cm reflector telescope and could just barely see the main arc of nebulosity as a grey ghost in the eyepiece. And that was under perfect dark Australian sky conditions.

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012

Giant Bubble in the Southern Sky

The southern sky contains what must be the largest nebula in our sky, a giant bubble spanning a wide swath of the Milky Way.

This is the object known as the Gum Nebula. You can see it in my previous post, in the ultrawide view of the southern sky. Here I’m framing it with a normal 50mm lens that covers about 50° of sky. The Gum Nebula is completely invisible to the eye and shows up only on photos. It wasn’t even discovered until the 1950s, by Australian astronomer Colin Gum. It is #12 in his catalog of southern sky nebulas. I’ve always thought this was an example of an interstellar bubble, blown by intense winds from hot blue stars, of which there are many in this part of the Milky Way in Vela and Puppis. At left are the four stars of the False Cross in Carina and Vela.

But some sources claim this is a supernova remnant, the blasted remains of a star that blew up 1 to 2 million years ago. It is big because it is close by, just 450 to 1500 light years away depending on what side if the remnant you measure. If that’s the case, the star that exploded would have been quite a shadow-casting sight in our prehistoric sky, assuming it was that close to us when it blew up and was in the night sky at the time.

Either way, it is a great target for amateur photographers, and now with digital cameras it is easy to record. This night, some haze moving through added the photogenic glows around all the stars to bring out their colours.

December 16, 2012December 16, 2012

Ultrawide Southern Sky

This horizon-to-horizon image takes in a broad sweep of the southern Milky Way from Orion to the Southern Cross.

At upper left shines bright Jupiter in Taurus and the stars of Orion, upside down. To the right of Orion is Sirius in Canis Major, the brightest star in the night sky. To the right of Sirius above the Milky Way is Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky and one we don’t see from up north. The two satellite galaxy Magellanic Clouds are at upper right. Below them is the bright Milky Way through Carina and Crux, the Southern Cross. Alpha and Beta Centauri are just above the dark trees at right. This is the entire Milky Way you see on an early austral summer night from down under.

What stands out is the huge red bubble of gas called the Gum Nebula in Vela and Carina. It is strictly a photographic object but shows up well on red-sensitive digital cameras.

I shot this with a filter-modified Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 15mm wide-angle lens on a mount tracking the stars. It is a stack of four 6-minute exposures, shot from Australia a few nights ago under nearly perfect sky conditions.

December 12, 2012December 12, 2012

The Amazing Orion Nebula

My Australian nights are proving to be frequently and thankfully clear enough that I’ve got the luxury of shooting some familiar “home sky” objects. This is the famous Orion Nebula in the Sword of Orion, about 1500 light years away.

I’ve shot this nebula many times from the northern hemisphere but my Australian skies are darker than at home, and the nights a lot warmer than when this object is up in our winter sky.

The Orion Nebula is a complex consisting of Messier 42, the main nebula, M43, a small nebula attached to the north (above) and the bluish Running Man Nebula (can you see his dark figure?) at top that is officially catalogued as NGC 1973-5-7. Together, these make up the largest region of star formation in our corner of the Milky Way. It’s easy to see with the unaided eye on a dark night.

To shoot this, I blended three different exposures, short (4 x 1 minute), medium (4 x 5 minutes) and long (4 x 15 minutes), to preserve all the details from the intensely bright core our to the faint tendrils extending into deep space. I stacked the 4 frames taken at each of the exposure times, then blended those stacks using masks in Photoshop CS6 (and its wonderful and editable Refine Mask function) to mask out the overexposed area of the longer exposure and let the shorter exposure content shine through. The result is that the core still shows the little cluster of stars, the Trapezium, and the characteristic green tint of the core. But I applied lots of Curves to bring out the fainter bits and swirls in the periphery.

I shot this through my Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm refractor at f/5.8 using the filter-modified Canon 5D MkII camera, at ISO 400. This turned out to be certainly my best shot of Orion yet in my library.

December 11, 2012December 11, 2012

Southern Milky Way in the Blue of Dawn

At the end of a nearly perfect night of southern stargazing, I shot this wide-angle portrait of the southern Milky Way embedded in the deep blue of morning twilight.

In December at dawn, the southern Milky Way extends from Orion (at the extreme right) down through Canis Major, Puppis and Vela (where you can see a large faint red bubble-shaped nebula high in the south) then continues east (left) into Carina and Crux. The red Carina Nebula sits in the Milky Way and the Southern Cross is at left, rising before the two Pointer Stars, Alpha and Beta Centauri. The Magellanic Clouds sits above the cottage I’m using as my southern hemisphere home for stargazing while I am in Australia.

December 11, 2012December 11, 2012

Southern Spectacular in Carina

The Carina Nebula ranks as one of the most spectacular sights in the southern sky.

I shot this last night under perfect conditions. I’ve shot this nebula many times before but had to have a go at it again – I think this version is the best yet of many I’ve taken over the years of coming to the southern hemisphere to shoot the sky. I shot this through my 4-inch apo refractor with a filter-modified Canon 5D MkII camera. It’s a stack of five 12-minute exposures at ISO 400.

This massive nebula is the site of loads of star formation, and home to one massive young star, Eta Carinae, that is a prime candidate for a supernova explosion sometime soon. That will certainly stir things up in Carina. This object sits over 6,000 light years away in the next spiral arm in from ours, the Carina-Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way.

Through the telescope it fills the field with intricate shades of grey — the colours show up only in photos – with one bright yellow star at the centre, Eta Carinae itself shrouded in the golden-hued nebula it cast off during its last explosive outburst in the 1840s.

Like the Large Magellanic Cloud, this is one object worth the trip to southern skies just to see for yourself.

December 10, 2012December 10, 2012

In the Lair of the Tarantula Nebula

This is one of the most spectacular areas of the southern sky, around the lair of the Tarantula Nebula.

I shot this close up of the Large Magellanic Cloud last night, December 10, 2012 to frame the most interesting part of the LMC, the massive Tarantula Nebula. This star-forming region is much larger than any in our Milky Way, yet exists in a small dwarf galaxy that is a satellite of our Milky Way. But tidal forces from our Milky Way are torturing the Magellanic Clouds and stirring up massive amounts of star formation. If the Tarantula were as close to us as is the Orion Nebula some 1500 light years from us, the Tarantula would cover 30° of sky and cast shadows at night. Good thing perhaps that the wicked Tarantula is 160,000 light years away.

I shot this with my 105mm apo refractor. It’s a stack of 5 x 12 minute guided exposures, using the filter-modified Canon 5D MkII camera.

This is a wonderful region of sky to explore with any telescope. I had a great look at it through my 10-inch Dobsonian reflector last night. Well worth the trip to the southern hemisphere to see!

December 9, 2012December 9, 2012

Australian Sky Panorama

This is the southern hemisphere sky in a 360° panorama.

From left to right in the sky, you can see:

– in the South: the two Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of the Milky Way

– in the West: the diagonal glow of Zodiacal Light

– in the North: Orion, Jupiter and the Pleiades above the outline of Timor Rock

– in the East: the southern Milky Way just rising

I shot this last night in the early evening, Sunday, December 9, from my observing site in Australia, Timor Cottage at Coonabarabran, NSW. It’s a panorama of 8 images, each a 1 minute untracked exposure with the 10-22mm lens at 10mm. I’m amazed at how well the sections join together, considering the stars are moving from one frame to the next and about 16 minutes separates the beginning and end frames.

December 7, 2012December 7, 2012

Catching the Zodiacal Light

From a truly dark sky site, subtle sky glows become obvious. This is the Zodiacal Light of evening.

The Sun has long set and the very last glow of twilight is colouring the sky just above the hills. But reaching up from the sunset point in the northwest is a long triangular glow extending far to the south. This is called the Zodiacal Light – it does not originate in our atmosphere but is from sunlight reflecting off comet dust orbiting the inner solar system in the same plane as Earth’s orbit. Or at least that’s where we see it appearing the brightest, as a glow brightest near the Sun and extending along the ecliptic plane, where we find the constellations of the Zodiac. Here it appears in Capricornus and Aquarius.

I shot this two nights ago, from Coonabarabran, Australia, so the orientation of the Zodiacal Light is different from what we see from the Northern Hemisphere. Here it extends up from left to right. From home in Canada – and you can see the Light from northern latitudes on a dark night – it would be angled up from right to left, a mirror image of what we see here.

The subtle glow of Zodiacal Light is best seen in the evening sky in spring, no matter your hemisphere. I took this on December 6, 2012, still officially spring in the southern hemisphere if you assume southern summer starts on the solstice, December 21. However, Australians say summer begins December 1, so this is a portrait of the Zodiacal Light on a warm summer evening down under.

December 7, 2012December 7, 2012

Visiting The Dish – The Parkes Radio Telescope

On Friday I had the pleasure and privilege of giving a talk at “The Dish.”

This is the Parkes Radio Telescope, a big 64-metre diameter dish antenna used to explore the radio sky. To the public it is famous for starring in the Australian movie, The Dish, that told the story, somewhat accurately but with liberal license throughout, of how the The Dish was used to receive the first TV signals from the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

Next week The Dish celebrates an important anniversary, 50 years since December 14, 1962 when Parkes received the signals from the first successful interplanetary probe, Mariner 2, flying past Venus, revealing that planet’s hellish conditions for the first time.

While The Dish is called upon occasionally to serve as a ground station for planet probes, its primary mission is to record natural radio signals from deep space objects, notably pulsars, spinning neutron stars. CSIRO’s website presents lots of information on the Parkes telescope.

Last night I presented a talk and picture show about the wonderful sky events in 2012, highlighted by the Great Australian Eclipse, to a nearly full house of local amateur astronomers at the Visitor Centre, where I took this photo. The talk was part of the monthly meeting, open to the public, of the Central West Astronomical Society, a very active club of which I am proud to be an honourary member. Whenever I am in Australia I try to get to Parkes on the club’s meeting night, to give a talk to the group and to meet up again with many of my Australian astronomy friends. It was a great evening. Thank you all!

December 5, 2012December 5, 2012

Depth of Detail in the Large Magellanic Cloud

If this was the only unique object in the southern sky that we couldn’t see from up North, then it would still be worth travelling south of the equator to see the southern sky.

This is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way. Being “just” 160,000 light years away (as opposed to millions of light years for most galaxies) this object is large (it fills the field of binoculars) and is rich in detail. Just look at all the pinkish nebulas dotting its ragged structure. The biggest is near the bottom, the massive Tarantula Nebula. Through a telescope there is so much to see in this object it takes careful comparisons with charts and atlases over several nights just to figure out what all the nebulas and clusters are in the eyepiece. It is a deep-sky observer’s dream object. While several professional astronomers have made their careers studying just the Magellanic Clouds.

Once classed as an irregular, ragged galaxy, the “LMC” is now thought of as a barred spiral. I think this photo suggests the two spiral arms coming off the top and bottom of the central elongated bar.

I shot this last night, under a perfect night of viewing in Coonabarabran, Australia, using a 135mm telephoto lens. The field is similar to what you see in binoculars though the long exposure (this is a stack of ten 5-minute tracked exposures) brings out more detail than the eye can see. Compare this wide view with a higher magnification shot I took two years ago from the same location. Both are good but I like this wider view better as it sets this big object into the celestial frame of the surrounding night sky.

December 5, 2012December 5, 2012

Cottage Under the Southern Stars

Here’s what heaven on Earth looks like to an amateur astronomer.

It’s a cottage all to myself under some of the darkest skies on Earth, and in the southern hemisphere where all the best stuff is in the sky. This is Timor Cottage near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia, the self-proclaimed Astronomy Capital of Australia. Near Coona sits Siding Spring Observatory, home to Australia’s largest collection of optical research telescopes. I’m staying nearby, at this cottage under the stars doing my own southern sky explorations.

I was here in December 2010 but had to contend with torrential rains and floods two years ago. As you can see, the weather is much better in 2012!

This is a one minute exposure looking south, toward the most prominent objects in the southern evening sky at this time of year: the two Magellanic Clouds. They look like detached parts of the Milky Way but are separate dwarf galaxies orbiting our Galaxy and in the process of being ripped apart by our Galaxy’s tidal forces.

The red light at left is my other camera taking a shot of the Clouds through a telescope, the subject of my next blog.

It’s a perfect night when the only clouds in the sky are the Magellanic Clouds!

December 2, 2012December 2, 2012

Whitsunday Sunset

This was a perfect sunset for displaying the subtle shades of twilight.

On this evening the sky over the ocean showed off the classic sunset gradient from deep orange though yellow, purple and into deep twilight blue. I shot this on the water on my cruise around the Whitsunday Islands on board the Solway Lass. Note the dark reflections of clouds in the water.

We’re looking west, of course – the Sun still sets in the west in the southern hemisphere! – which is back toward the mainland of Queensland, Australia.

December 2, 2012December 2, 2012

Island Moon At Sunset

One of the great joys of sailing and being out on the water is the wonderful sunsets. In this case, sunset included a fine moonrise.

This is the gibbous Moon of November 26 in the evening sky over the Whitsunday Islands in Australia. On this evening we were moored in Baur Bay, at South Molle Island. The bright waxing Moon shines amid the red clouds in the east still lit by the last rays of the setting Sun from the west. It is everyday scenes like this, painted with the wonderful palette of colours only the sky can provide, that you begin to appreciate all the more – or more to the point, simply see – as you become “sky aware.” So no great science lessons to learn here – just some beautiful colours to soothe the soul as gentle waves lap against the side of the ship.

November 30, 2012November 30, 2012

Sailing Toward Orion

Not so long ago sailors used the Moon, Jupiter and the stars to chart their course on Earth. All are in this moonlit seascape.

I took this shot on November 27, as we set sail toward Hook Passage in the Whitsunday Islands, Queensland, Australia. The ship is the Solway Lass, a 110-year-old sailing ship that is now the oldest commercial ship plying the waters around Australia. It has been modernized and refitted, and at night runs with engines, not sails. And today, of course, GPS keeps the skipper informed of where the ship is. But before GPS and radio navigation, sailors used the sky to determine where on Earth they were.

Sextant sightings of the Sun and stars could give them their latitude and longitude. One star often used was Canopus, visible at far right in this image. Canopus has long been associated with the sea. It is the brightest star in Carina the Keel, once part of the sprawling constellation Argo Navis, the ship in the Greek legend of Jason and the Argonauts. Today, Canopus is still sighted by robot spacecraft bound for the planets to help them determine their position in the solar system.

Sirius and the stars of Orion (lying on his side here at a latitude of 20° South) appear through the rigging. At upper left is the bright glow of the nearly Full Moon, near the star Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster.

Before the acceptance in the late 1700s of the chronometer as an accurate time-keeping device, the position of the Moon near bright stars served as an astronomical clock in the sky to provide sailors with local time. Another source of time (more for land-based navigators) was the changing positions of the moons of Jupiter — Jupiter is the bright star-like object at left.

I just finished a superb 6 days of sailing around the Whitsundays and will have 2 or 3 more sea-bound posts from this wonderful area of the world.

November 22, 2012

Tropical Twilight

Oh, to be on the beach in the tropics now that winter’s here at home.

That’s where I was tonight, at the same beach on Magnetic Island, Queensland where I shot last night’s images of cloud shadows. You can see some of the same effect here, as the few darker clouds cast their dark shadows across the twilight. But in the clearer sky tonight, the classic colours of twilight are more pronounced than they were the previous night. The sunset sky goes from deep yellow near the horizon, through pinkish-purple and into deep blue high in the sky. The “twilight purple” is caused by red sunlight still illuminating the high atmosphere.

We see the same colour effects at temperate latitudes. It’s just a lot more pleasant enjoying a sunset on a warm beach in winter.

November 21, 2012

Cloud Shadows on the Beach

I went to the beach to shoot the sunset and saw one of the best examples of cloud shadows I’d ever seen.

These are called “crepuscular rays,” and are shadows cast across the atmosphere by clouds, in this case in the west blocking the light of the setting Sun. However, here I’m shooting east in the direction opposite the sunset, to see the shadows converging on the anti-Sun point.

The effect is really stunning, yet I doubt anyone on the beach paid much attention to it. But then again, that’s the whole point of my AmazingSky blog — to call attention to neat stuff you can see in the sky if you only look up.

The site is Horseshoe Bay on the north end of Magnetic Island, off the coast of Queensland, near Townsville. I’m here for two days enjoying the island life. It has now been one week since the total eclipse of the Sun. Hard to imagine!

November 20, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – The Closeup Movie

This is the “director’s cut” movie of the November 14 total eclipse of the Sun in Australia, unabridged and unedited.

I shot this movie of the eclipse through a telescope to provide a frame-filling closeup view of totality. This is the entire eclipse, from just before totality until well after. So it includes both diamond rings: at the onset of totality and as totality ends.

A few seconds into the movie I remove the solar filter which produces a flash of light until the camera readjusts to the new exposure. Then you really see the eclipsed Sun!

We got 1m28s of totality from our viewing site near Lakeland Downs, Queensland. But the movie times out at slightly less, because at several points where you hear a shutter click, I took a still frame which interrupts the movie. You can see some of those still images in earlier blog posts.

My timing was a little off, as I opened up the exposure to reveal more of the outer corona only moments before the end of totality, so the first moment of the final diamond ring is a little overexposed. During totality I was looking with binoculars, and made the mistake of going over and checking on my other wide-angle time-lapse camera. That wasted time needlessly. I should have spent more time attending to the movie camera and taking more stills at various exposures. No eclipse every goes quite as planned. Losing 30 seconds of totality in order to seek out clearer skies did cost me some images and enjoyment time in the umbra. But our experience was far less stressful than those who dodged clouds (or failed to miss the clouds, in some cases) at sites closer to or at the coast.

The original of this movie is in full 1920 x 1080 HD, shot with the Canon 60Da through the 105mm f/5.8 Astro-Physics apo refractor, on an equatorial mount tracking the Sun. I rarely have the luxury of shooting an eclipse through such extravagant gear, as I would never haul that type of hefty gear now on an aircraft to remote sites. But this equipment emigrated to Australia in 2002 for the total eclipse in South Australia and has been here down under ever since. So this is its second Australian eclipse. Mine, too!

November 19, 2012

Southern Milky Way Setting & Zodiacal Light

On the eve of the November 14 total eclipse of the Sun, I was able to shoot the Milky Way setting amid the vertical glow of the evening Zodiacal Light.

This scene looks west toward the sunset point, but was taken well after sunset. The Milky Way and the area of Sagittarius where the centre of the Galaxy lies is just setting. The same area of sky contains a vertical pillar of light, very subtle, called the Zodiacal Light. This is sunlight reflected off dust particles orbiting the inner solar system and deposited by passing comets. The Zodiacal Light is best seen in the evening sky on dark moonless nights in spring, no matter what your hemisphere. But in this case it is November, spring in the southern hemisphere.

At left are the two Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, and visible at their best only from south of the equator. In this case we are at 16° South latitude.

The site is a lookout on the Mulligan Highway inland from Port Douglas where we made for the day before the eclipse and camped out overnight, along with a parking lot full of fellow eclipse chasers. But the morning still brought worrying clouds in the direction of the Sun, so we moved farther north to the site you see in my earlier Great Australian Eclipse blogs.

November 18, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Stars & Planets in the Darkened Sky

During last week’s total eclipse, Venus was obvious above the Sun well before the shadow descended and the sky darkened. But during totality other stars and planets appeared.

But I suspect few noticed! During an eclipse your eyes are transfixed on the Sun and its corona. And on the other phenomena of light and shadow happening around you. However, I inspected my wide-angle frames and found faint images of Saturn and the stars Spica, Alpha and Beta Centauri, and three stars of the Southern Cross. I’ve labeled them here but you might not be able to pick them out on screen in the reduced resolution that appears in the blog. Similarly, I doubt anyone saw them visually. If you did you were wasting your time looking at the wrong stuff!

November 16, 2012November 16, 2012

Endeavour’s Site at Cooktown, Queensland

I began my journey to Australia with a visit to the replica of James Cook’s ship Endeavour in Sydney. I’m ending this part of my trip with a visit to where Cook beached the HMB Endeavour for repairs at what is now Cooktown in far north Queensland. This is where Cook spent the most time in Australia, though not by intention.

In 1770 Cook was sailing north along the Queensland coast, after visiting Tahiti the year before to see the transit of Venus. He inadvertently discovered the Great Barrier Reef. Endeavour ran aground on what is now called Endeavour Reef. The crew was able to repair the ship well enough and save themselves by getting Endeavour to this harbour at what is now Cooktown where the Cook River meets the Coral Sea. There, with the ship beached, they were able to effect more permanent repairs to its damaged hull.

The site is just below this viewpoint at an idyllic harbour. They stayed there for two months in July and August 1770, effecting repairs and sighting, among other curiosities, kangaroos for the first time.

I visited Cooktown yesterday as part of a 4WD trek up the Bloomfield Track north of Cape Tribulation and through the Daintree Rain Forest. At Cooktown its museum, converted from an old convent, contains the original main anchor and one of the large canons from Endeavour, recovered from where the crew tossed them overboard to lighten the ship’s load and gain draft to sail off the reef. They are some of the few pieces of Endeavour that still remain.

November 14, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – The Shadow Movie

This is 6 minutes of pre- and post-eclipse – and the all too short eclipse itself – compressed into 30 seconds. You can see the dark blue shadow of the Moon sweeping across the sky.

The long oval shadow comes in from behind us from the west and comes down to meet the Sun which is rising in the east. That moment when the shadow edge meets the Sun is second contact when totality begins in a diamond ring effect, and the Sun is entirely hidden behind the Moon.

The shadow then moves off to the right. As its left edge hits the Sun, the Sun emerges in another diamond ring and the eclipse is over. All too soon. Even at mid-eclipse the Sun is not centred in the oval shadow because we were not centred in the path of the shadow but instead drive well north of the centreline, to avoid cloud farther south. We saw 1m28s of totality, 30 seconds less than people at the centreline or on the coast. But we had no annoying clouds to worry about.

Also note Venus at upper left. And the hugs and kisses at the end!

November 14, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Our Happy Group!

OK, one last eclipse post! Here’s our happy band of Canadian chasers, post-eclipse.

Some were seeing their first eclipse. A few others, myself included, were chalking up eclipse #14. Eclipse virgin or veteran, the experience is always breathtaking and unbelievable. Moments after the eclipse ends you cannot believe you saw what you did – the sight is so unearthly. And you want to see another. The next total eclipse of the Sun is November 3, 2013, in the mid-Atlantic and over central Africa.

November 13, 2012November 13, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Second Diamond Ring

This is the sight eclipse chasers hate to see, yet celebrate the most! It is the diamond ring that ends totality.

This was the “third contact” diamond ring when the Sun returned in an explosion of light from behind the edge of the Moon.

Compare this view to my earlier blog, and you’ll see that the second diamond ring at the end of totality did not happen opposite the first diamond ring. That’s because we were well off the centreline of the Moon’s shadow, so from our perspective the Moon travelled across the Sun’s disk slightly off-centre.

From where we ended up in our chase for clear skies, we experienced 1m28s of totality, well under the 2 minutes maximum that others saw near the centreline. But we felt 1m28s of clear skies was better than 2 minutes under partly cloudy skies. Indeed, some on the coast saw the Sun only briefly during totality, or not at all.

Instead, while the last minute move was stressing, once we were set up, we had relaxed assurance we were going to see the whole show!

November 13, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Outer Corona

For this shot I overexposed the inner corona on purpose to reveal more of the extent of the streamers in the Sun’s outer corona.

The pink at left is the chromosphere layer shining from behind the Moon just before the Moon uncovered the blindingly bright photosphere with a burst of light, the diamond ring.

It takes a lot of specialized processing, far beyond what I’ve done here, and stacking of multiple exposures to reveal the delicacy of structures that you can see with your aided eyes during a total eclipse. There is nothing more astonishing in the sky for its complexity and yet subtleness than the Sun’s corona. It is the main attraction at any total solar eclipse. You have not lived astronomically until you have seen the corona of the Sun with your own eyes.

November 13, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Inner Corona

Taken shortly into totality, this shot shows some of the complex structure of the Sun’s corona, and a cluster of red prominences peaking out from behind the bottom edge of the Moon.

For the November 14, 2012 eclipse I shot two cameras. One, with a wide-angle lens, was automatically taking a frame every second. Three of those frames are in a previous blog. For this shot I used a second camera looking through a 4-inch refractor telescope I keep stored in Australia. It worked great! I seldom get to shoot an eclipse through a telescope, as so many eclipses are in remote locations where carting a telescope and mount are impractical. But for an Oz eclipse (I’ve seen two from Australia now, in 2002 and now in 2012) I get to use my Oz gear.

Because the Sun is nearing solar maximum its corona appeared evenly distributed around the Sun, with streamers reaching out in all directions. At solar minima eclipses the corona extends just east-west with little over the poles.

This image, like the other closeups I’m posting, are still frames shot while the camera was taking an HD movie. Firing the shutter while the movie is recording interrupts the movie but records a full-resolution still frame, a very nice way to get two forms of media with one camera.

November 13, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Diamond Ring #1

The last bit of the Sun shines from behind the ragged edge of the Moon as the total eclipse begins in Australia.

This is “second contact,” and the first diamond ring effect that heralds the start of totality. The Moon (the dark disk) is just about to completely cover the Sun. You can see the pink chromosphere layer of the Sun’s surface and a flame-like prominence at 4 o’clock position. The Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, is just beginning to show.

I took this November 14, 2012 from a site near Lakeland Downs, Queensland, Australia. While we did look through some thin cirrus clouds, they didn’t hamper viewing at all, and were not the concern that the thicker clouds were at other sites, especially at the beaches.

November 13, 2012

The Great Australian Eclipse – Success!

It wouldn’t be an eclipse without a chase. But in the end we had a nearly perfect and cloudless view of the entire eclipse — the Great Australian Eclipse. We were ecstatic!

This collage of wide-angle shots shows the motion of the Moon’s conical shadow. At top, you can see the bottom edge of the shadow just touching the Sun. This was second contact and the diamond ring that begins totality. The middle frame was taken near mid-eclipse and shows the bright horizon beyond the Moon’s shadow. However, the Sun is not centred on the shadow because we ended up well north of the centreline, sacrificing as much as 30+ seconds of totality to get assured clear skies. The bottom frame was taken at the end of totality as the first bit of sunlight bursts out from behind the Moon at third contact and the final diamond ring. Notice the Sun sitting at the well-defined left edge of the Moon’s shadow. The shadow moved off to the right.

Why did we end up off-centre? Clouds! The day before, at our 11 am weather briefing meeting, we decided not to stay on the beach but to move inland to one of the sites we selected from the previous day’s reconnaissance. The forecast was not even accurately “predicting” the current conditions at the time, saying the sky should then have been clear. It was raining. We did not trust the predictions that skies would clear by eclipse time on Wednesday morning.

We drove inland on Tuesday afternoon, getting to our choice site at the James Earl Lookout on the Development Road about 4 pm, to avoid driving in the dark and to get there before the parking area filled up. It was a good plan. We arrived to find a few people there but with room for all our cars filled with 20+ Canadians. We staked our ground with tripods, did a little stargazing after dark, then settled in to spend the night in our cars.

At dawn we got everything ready to go, only to see puffs of orographic clouds forming over the hills in the direction of the Sun. I did not like it. So with an hour to go before totality we packed up and moved down onto the plains away from the hills to a site near Lakeland Downs, the site you see here. Apart from some high cirrus clouds, skies were superb.

As it turned out, folks a few miles away at the Lookout did see it, but by the skin of their teeth. Clouds obscured the Sun just before and just after totality. That’s too nerve-wracking for me. And from the beaches, some people were clouded out, others saw all of totality, others saw just a portion of the main event. It was hit and miss. From home at Oak Beach we might have seen it but only just. We were very happy with our decisions to move and flexibility to be able to do so.

I’ll post some close-up shots of the eclipse shortly.

Tonight, we party!

November 12, 2012

Our Eclipse Group at Work

Nothing could be farther from an astrophoto than this, but this is what it takes to get a great shot – planning!

Here is our little group of Canadian eclipse chasers sitting around the patio table planning alternate viewing sites that we had inspected earlier that day on the Monday, two days before the eclipse. Maps, photos and weather forecasts all go into the mix to make a decision where best to be for the total eclipse of the Sun.

We found some good inland sites but getting to those would require leaving the comforts of home the afternoon before the eclipse to be in place for dawn on Wednesday and avoid driving the roo and cattle infested outback roads at night. We would prefer to stay on the beach, and weather prospects are improving. But if the eclipse had been this morning we would not have seen it from this location.

November 12, 2012

Sign on the Centreline

I’m in eclipse country here, as the sign proclaims, just about on the centreline of the coming Moon’s shadow.

Today we drove 3 to 4 hours out onto what is called the Development Road or the Mulligan Highway, inland from the beaches where we are staying. This is the road that goes up to Cooktown (where Captain James Cook beached the Endeavour in 1770) from Port Douglas, but via the inland route. As you can see it is dry! That’s a good thing. While the coast was cloudy and rainy today, Monday, the inland sites we inspected were sunny, with word from the locals that the morning at eclipse time was perfectly clear. As it always is they promised us!

So we have some Plan B sites selected, and checked out with the local Queensland Police to make sure we’re OK to use them. However, weather forecasts for Wednesday morning at eclipse time are promising clear skies on the coast where we would prefer to stay in convenient comfort.

Not far from here, near the Palmer River Roadhouse, some 8,000 people have gathered in the dusty Outback for a festival of music and “new age healing.” We’re seeing lots of the participants on the road (often driving beat-up vans) looking like they’ve been transported by time machine from the 1960s and Woodstock. Eclipses attract many people of all interests to the track of the Moon’s shadow. Good luck to them … and us, two days from now.

November 11, 2012

Two Days to Go Until the Eclipse

This was the sky at eclipse time, two days prior to the total eclipse of the Sun.

Had the eclipse been today we likely would have missed it. The Sun broke through briefly but minutes later the rain seen here off shore was over us. But a few minutes later it was clear and sunny again. It will be a game of chance to be sure.

Today, we travel inland to scout out viewing sites 3 hours away over the Dividing Range on the Development Road as a Plan B.

November 11, 2012

On the Beach — Stargazing

This is stargazing in the tropics — on the beach, in shorts and sandals.

Here’s some of our eclipse chasing group enjoying a view of the southern hemisphere night sky, albeit though clouds. Jupiter is the bright object at left, Orion is rising on his side in the middle, Sirius is just above our stargazers, while Canopus is at far right. The Pleiades is at far left. We’re looking east, from a latitude of 16° south of the equator, where the sky takes on a completely new appearance that baffles and delights even seasoned northern stargazers.

November 10, 2012

Three Days to Go Until the Eclipse

Skies and spirits brightened this morning as we were greeted to a wonderfully clear sunrise.

I took this moments ago on the morning of Sunday, November 11, three days before the total eclipse. If the eclipse had been this morning we would have seen it in grand style.

Nevertheless, we will continue our scouting of inland locations over the Dividing Range, at sites some 2 to 3 hours drive away. If the weather forecast looks gloomy the day before we will make a run for it inland but will have to make that call the afternoon before the eclipse to avoid driving in the dark with roos on the road. The eclipse happens an hour after sunrise on Wednesday, with the Sun a little higher than its position here. Ideally, we watch the eclipse from where I took this photo! But one must always have a Plan B and C in pocket.