Astronomy author and photographer Alan Dyer presents amazing sky sights
Here’s a wider shot of the Moon-Jupiter-Venus gathering at dawn on July 14.
The clouds parted nicely for a clear view of the sky where it needed to be clear (a rare occurrence!) while adding their colour to the pre-dawn scene. I like cooperative clouds. Let’s see if they behave for tomorrow morning’s closer conjunction.
— Alan, July 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Venus and Jupiter are reprising their mutual meetings of earlier this spring, but now in the pre-dawn summer sky.
This was the scene at 4 a.m. from home on July 14, with the waning crescent Moon, here overexposed, above Jupiter and Venus at dawn. Next to Venus is the star Aldebaran and the stars of the Hyades star cluster in Taurus. Above the Moon is the Pleiades star cluster.
On July 15, the Moon will appear between Venus and Jupiter for one of the best conjunctions of 2012.
— Alan, July 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Let the camera shoot for a few hours and this is what you get: stars circling the sky, turning into concentric paths around the North Star.
For this image I stacked 230 short exposures, each 50 seconds long, taken over about 4 hours time on July 7/8. My previous blog entry is one of those individual frames. But in this composite, the stars become trails rotating about the pole of the sky, near Polaris, the North Star, here over Num-Ti-Jah Lodge at Bow Lake in Banff. Moonlight provides the illumination and turns the sky blue, just as in daytime, only much dimmer. But the long exposures bring out the colours and make the scene look like daylight, because the light of the Moon is daylight, just reflected first off the Moon’s neutral grey face.
The same frames used to make this still frame composite can also be used to make a time-lapse movie of the circumpolar stars turning.
— Alan, July 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
“Around the fire tonight Jim Simpson said that for his money this campsite was the closest one could get to heaven on Earth. And I reckon he’s not far wrong.” — Bill Peyto at Bow Lake, July 11, 1902.
Peyto penned that description 110 years ago to the day. His friend always said he’d build a shack here one day. And he did. This is Num-Ti-Jah Lodge, a classic wood log building, hand-hewn and assembled by Jimmy Simpson and his family in the 1940s. They ran the lodge for many years.
I was there this past weekend, July 6 and 7, shooting nightscape photos under the waning Moon. This view looks due north, with the Big Dipper and Polaris over the lodge. To the right, in the northeast, glows a faint red aurora. To the northwest stands Mount Jimmy Simpson, named for the pioneer who built his dream lodge at his heaven-on-Earth campsite.
Heaven is not without its dangers however. Earlier in the evening a yearling grizzly bear was wandering around the lodge and had to be scared off by a Parks official. I’m glad he did! Meeting a bear in the dark is a hazard of shooting in the mountains I have yet to encounter, and don’t wish to.
— Alan, July 11, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
What a fabulous night this was — perfectly clear and the gibbous moon lighting up the mountains. It was a wonderland for nightscape photography.
I took this shot late on Friday, July 6 at Bow Lake in Banff, Alberta. The summer stars shine behind Bow Glacier, and the peaks are illuminated by the rising waning Moon. Saturn, setting behind the continental divide, is reflected in the still waters while Arcturus shines high in the sky.
This is one frame of 320 I took through the night for a time-lapse movie, and for stacking into a long star-trail composite. Those are still to come!
Compare this to the scene I took last summer under a dimmer quarter Moon and later in the season.
— Alan, July 8, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
It’s been a season of crescents. A crescent Sun in eclipse. A crescent Venus before and after transit. But this is the more familiar Moon.
I caught the waning crescent Moon rising before the dawn on Saturday, June 16, after an all-night shooting session amid the summer twilight. As dawn was breaking, the Moon rose in the east and drifted through clouds near the horizon.
Here, the glow of Earthshine lighting up the dark night side of the Moon appears just a little brighter than the twilight sky.
This is an “old Moon,” as at this phase the Moon is three days before new, at age 26 days. At new moon, the Moon is “reborn” and appears anew as a crescent in the evening sky.
— Alan, June 16, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This was my first look at Venus following Tuesday’s transit. Here, it’s just six degrees west of the Sun as a thin crescent in the afternoon sky. It was a beautiful sight in the eyepiece, far enough away from the Sun to not be in its glare but close enough to still appear as a razor-thin backlit crescent.
Each day now Venus is widening the gap between it and the Sun, shortly to become a brilliant morning star in the eastern sky before dawn through the rest of June, July and August.
I shot these images in broad daylight through a 130mm f/6 refractor. The big image is a full-frame shot with the Canon 60Da and a 2X Barlow lens, for an effective focal length of about 1500mm. The inset is a single frame grabbed from a 30-frame-per-second movie shot with the Canon in its Movie Crop mode, which yields a high-magnification view suitable for planet shooting, but only 640 x 480 pixels. But this mode is certainly ideal for capturing planets, though none ever appear as large as Venus is here. This is an uncommon instance of Venus as close and as large as any planet gets.
— Alan, June 9, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
The day looked hopeless with not a chance of clear skies. But a small hole opened, revealing Venus on the Sun.
I had seen this sight before, in 2004 from Egypt. But my first reaction upon seeing it again, albeit briefly, was [Expletive Deleted]!!! No photos really provide the visual impression of just how enormous Venus appears on the Sun. We’re used to sunspots (and there were lots today) and some quite large. But nothing we ever see on the Sun matches the size of Venus. The eyepiece impression is of something much larger than the photos show. It’s like Moon illusion at work on the Sun.
It had been hopelessly cloudy all day in Calgary. Interpretive obligations over at the science centre (where we showed the NASA webcast from Hawaii), I hit the highway in search of a clear hole … and found one northeast of the city, one at first that seemed to be wide and stable. I stopped, looked with the filtered naked eye, then drove on seeking slightly less cloud, getting greedy! I should have stopped sooner. By the time I did stop and hurriedly set up the little 80mm refractor telescope, I had about 30 seconds for a great clean view, then switched to the camera. By the time I got it set, clouds were coming out of nowhere and thickening fast. I couldn’t shoot through the solar filter. This is a filterless shot, at 1/8000th second! Clouds provided the natural filtration. Fine! At least I got the camera focused, for a crisp view of Venus next to the clusters of sunspots, something no one alive has seen — in 2004 the Sun was virtually spotless.
So, not a view or photo under the best of conditions, but an experience I am happy to settle for. Now, I just want clear skies in Australia for November’s total solar eclipse. Please!!
— Alan, June 5, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This was the kind of eclipse chasing I like — just to the end of my driveway … to shoot the partial eclipse of the Moon before dawn on June 4.
While the car is all packed with gear for a possible flight or cross-country chase to clear skies to catch the Venus transit tomorrow, the lunar eclipse required no travel at all. Not that I was going to make too much effort at 4 am!
While some clouds got in the way, a clear hole opened up at the right time, with the remaining clouds adding a photogenic touch. I’m hoping to be as lucky for the transit!
This was just a partial lunar eclipse, with only 37 percent of the Moon immersed in the Earth’s umbral shadow at mid-eclipse, shortly after this image was taken. Even so, some of the reddening of the shadowed portion of the Moon’s disk does show up here.
I shot this from southern Alberta with a Canon 60Da and an 18-200mm lens at 115mm to frame the Moon and prairie landscape.
— Alan, June 4, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This wonderful rainbow lasted only a few minutes, as most do, shining in the brief interval when sunlight and raindrops are at their combined best.
I captured this rainbow off the back deck, on June 2, as a storm receded to the east and the Sun broke through in the west, ideal circumstances for catching a rainbow, at least photographically.
This was a classic bow, showing the inner main bow and the fainter outer secondary bow with colours reversed. The sky is bright inside the the inner bow from scattered light from the raindrops, and darker between the two bows where there is an absence of scattered light, a phenomenon called Alexander’s Dark Band after the ancient Greek astronomer who first described it.
I used a Canon 60Da and 10-22mm lens for this, at 10mm for wide-angle coverage of almost the entire rainbow.
— Alan, June 3, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
A wonderful sight tonight, as I caught Venus in its last days before the transit, shining as a glistening crescent low in the evening twilight.
Venus was visible to the unaided eye after sunset, but not for long. It set soon after the Sun. But for a short while it put on a beautiful show as a large crescent (large for a planet that is), easily resolvable in binoculars and stunning in a small telescope. One could almost make out, for brief moments, the sight of the backlit atmosphere going all the way around the disk. But I suspect it was more imagination at work than reality shining through.
The inset blows up the boxed area, to reveal the crescent-phased disk of Venus, despite this shot being taken with no more than a 200mm telephoto lens. I used a Canon 60Da camera at ISO 100. A plane is flying just below Venus.
So this was May 30, 6 days before the June 5 transit, with Venus 9.5° east of the Sun. How far up to the Sun can we catch it, before it crosses the Sun on Tuesday?
— Alan, May 30, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Here’s a last look at Venus before its historic transit across the face of the Sun on June 5.
I took this Monday evening, May 28, with the Sun still up and Venus about 13 degrees east of the Sun but low in my evening sky. Venus appears as a razor-thin crescent, like a tiny “new Moon.” Most of the daylight side of Venus now faces away from us; on the side of Venus turned toward us now all but a sliver of a crescent is dark — we’re looking at the night side of Venus. On June 5, all we will see is this dark side of Venus, appearing in silhouette in front of the Sun’s brilliant disk as Venus moves across the Sun in a transit not to be repeated for another 105 years.
This is a single still-frame grab from a movie shot I shot with the Canon 60Da camera, set in Movie Crop Mode, for a movie 640 x 480 pixels wide. This mode magnified Venus considerably on the frame. I shot this through a small 80mm apo refractor at its f/6 prime focus, so with only 480mm of focal length. But Venus is now so large it doesn’t take a lot of extra magnification to show its disk and phase.
The view through the eyepiece was stunning. The rippling image and sparkling colours, though from distortion in our atmosphere, added to the beauty of Venus, fitting for the goddess of love.
– Alan, May 28, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This was the view Sunday evening as the Sun descended into the northwest sky, accompanied by the Moon covering part of its disk.
I shot this near mid-eclipse with a handheld camera and filter dimming what would have otherwise been a vastly overexposed Sun. A liberal use of Photoshop’s Highlight recovery and Shadow details tools compressed the dynamic range even more, to bring out details in the sky and clouds and in the dark filtered image. But this is a single image, not a composite.
As you can see, even at its best the Sun shone through light cloud, which added somewhat to the scenery of the sky and the weird quality of the light at mid-eclipse. But all told, I’d rather do without clouds at any eclipse. They make for anxious moments I could live without.
I took this shot from the TELUS Spark science centre, where we set up sidewalk telescopes for viewing the eclipse, looking over the parking lot and hill to the west of us. It’s where the Sun will also be for the transit.
— Alan, May 21, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This was the first significant solar eclipse in many years that I did not travel to. For the May 20, 2012 eclipse I was content to stay at home on the sidelines and take in the partial eclipse of the Sun.
From Calgary, the Moon covered about 62% of the Sun at mid-eclipse, which this shot captures, taken at maximum eclipse for us. Here, a big sunspot group is just being uncovered by the passing Moon. Having lots of spots on the Sun this day made the partial eclipse all the more interesting, though still no comparison to the annular eclipse visible over the spectacular landscapes of the southwestern U.S.
I would have been there, in the Moon’s ant-umbral shadow, had it not been for the fact that at home I am very much involved in the opening of a new planetarium and digital dome theatre at the science centre, TELUS Spark, where I work. This is a milestone event in one’s life, one I’ve had the privilege of experiencing twice before, in 1984 in Edmonton with the opening of its new science centre and planetarium, and in 1996 when we converted the old Calgary Centennial Planetarium into a then state-of-the-art tilt-dome theatre. Oddly coincidental, I missed seeing the May 15, 1984 annular eclipse in the SE United States due to the imminent opening of the Edmonton theatre. History repeats itself — a Saros cycle of science centres perhaps?
For this eclipse we conducted a public viewing session and managed to grab excellent views once clouds cleared away before mid-eclipse. Eclipse anxiety was running high leading up to and through the initial minutes of the eclipse as it looked like clouds were going to skunk us. But wonder of wonders, the sky cleared and the eclipsed Sun was revealed, to my great relief. Missing the annular eclipse is bad enough; I didn’t want to miss the partial eclipse, too!
Now, we just need clear skies on June 5 for the transit of Venus.
— Alan, May 20, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
OK, it’s just a dot. But that dot is a massive star ending its life in a titanic supernova explosion.
Unlike all the other stars in this picture, which are close by in the foreground of our own Milky Way Galaxy, that one star indicated is 38 million light years away. It lies in another galaxy altogether, in the outer spiral arm of the galaxy M95. Discovered on March 16, Supernova SN 2012aw is now shining with the light of a hundred million suns as it blasts most of its starstuff into space.
It is these types of stellar explosions that seed the universe with the elements heavier than lead.
I took this shot Monday, April 9 through my 5-inch refractor, an instrument not ideally suited for shooting small objects like galaxies. But its wider field here does take in not just M95 but also its companion in space, the spiral M96 at left. Both are barred spiral galaxies in Leo, on the list of targets compiled by Charles Messier in the late 18th century and favourites of backyard astronomers. It’s rare to get a supernova as bright as this (anyone with a modest telescope can see it) letting off in a well-known “top 100” galaxy like M95.
Take a look on the next clear night, and contemplate the cosmic forces at work to make visible a single star across a gulf of 38 million light years.
— Alan, April 10, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
The goddess of love meets the daughters of Atlas — it isn’t often we get to see such a sight!
This is brilliant Venus shining amid the stars of the Pleiades, on the evening of Tuesday, April 3, 2012, with Venus as close to the Seven Sisters star cluster as I can ever remember seeing.
Venus last passed near the Pleiades in April 2004 (though not as closely as it did tonight), and will again in April 2020, reflecting the 8-year periodicity of Venus’s return to the same place in the sky. Thus the 8-year interval between the June 2004 transit of Venus and the one this June in 2012.
I took this through a 92mm aperture refractor, but added the classic spikes of light (which you would normally get only when shooting through a Newtonian reflector telescope) by taping some wire in front of the lens. It’s a technique that’s strictly for show. Some high cloud moving in, supposedly in advance of a big spring snowstorm, added the glow around Venus.
This was one of many superlative Venus events this year. Enjoy the sight of Venus now that it is as high as it ever gets in our northern hemisphere evening sky. We won’t see it quite as good as this again until 2020.
— Alan, April 3, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Orion is quickly disappearing from the dark night sky now, as spring begins and the winter constellations depart the sky. This is a shot from February, one I only just now processed.
The Belt of Orion really stands out as do the nebulas that wind all through and around Orion. This is a rich region of the sky for star formation.
I took this portrait of Orion using the 50mm Sigma lens, taking four 5-minute exposures and stacking them. In this case each exposure had varying amounts of haze in the sky as light clouds moved in. So the fuzzy glows around stars are from natural causes here, and are not produced by filters (as in the blog from last year called Fuzzy Constellations) or by post-processing. The glows bring out the star colours, particularly orangish Betelgeuse at upper left and blue Rigel at lower right.
This is the first image I’ve processed using the new Beta version of Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Camera Raw 7 software, just released this past week. Very nice indeed! You can download it for free from Adobe Labs. I like the new interface and functions. I’m not sure the final image quality is any better but some of the new features will be very nice for astrophotography and day to day use. Increased speed is promised but I haven’t seen much evidence for that. But this is a Beta version.
— Alan, March 24, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
The winter sky contains a lot of bright stars but none so bright as Venus and Jupiter now in the west.
This wide-angle shot takes in the evening sky from the duo of planets in the west (right) to Sirius shining brightly in the south (left), with Orion in between. Above and to the right of Orion sit the two big naked eye star clusters of winter: the scattered Hyades and the compact Pleiades.
This was the picture-perfect scene last Tuesday night when I shot other frames of just the planets over the house in the foothills of the Rockies near Bragg Creek, Alberta. This is the wider scene, bathed in the deep blue of twilight.
— Alan, March 16, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
For my continuing series of Venus-Jupiter conjunction shots, on Wednesday night I stayed in Calgary and shot the planets over the city skyline.
Here Venus and Jupiter shine in the clear evening twilight over the downtown core of the city, now dominated by the new Bow tower. I didn’t have to venture far for this shot, as the best vantage point and angle for framing the planets over the city was the top of Tom Campbell Hill, right beside the TELUS Spark science centre where I work.
We’ll see if the clear nights continue. But it’s been a good run all this week. The last few blogs show the results from each night’s shooting since Saturday.
— Alan, March 14, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
In another in my series of Venus & Jupiter nightscapes, I present this scenic portrait of the planets over a picture-perfect house in the foothills.
This was Tuesday, March 13 with the two planets at closest conjunction. I drove out to a favourite spot of mine, just south of Bragg Creek southwest of Calgary. The clouds hanging over the Rockies parted well enough to reveal the planet pair in the deep twilight and add other colours to the sky.
It was a stunning scene, one I’m sure the residents of the house were completely unaware of. The lights give that away. Wonderful scenery can be appreciated by night and by day.
— Alan, March 13, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Venus and Jupiter are the planets that just keep on giving! What a photogenic pairing they are proving to be this month.
Here they are behind one of the icons of the prairies, an old water pump windmill, made it would seem by the Flint and Walling Mfg. Co of Kendallville, Indiana, USA, probably in the 1930s or 40s. My area of southern Alberta was once considered too dry for agriculture and it was only irrigation that made the land livable. Individual farm pumps of the dustbowl era were replaced by a mega-project system of canals and reservoirs to water what is effectively a desert. And a windswept one. A blustery Chinook wind was blowing this night.
The pair of planets is at right, tonight in about as close a conjunction as they will get, about 3° apart. The Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in Taurus poke through the clouds at top. The night was quite hazy but the clouds added the yellow colour from Calgary streetlights in the distance. Natural twilight added the blues and purples. Car headlights lit the foreground.
— Alan, March 12, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This was the scene Sunday night, March 11, as Venus edged up to Jupiter in the evening twilight.
To capture the nightscape I hunted around for a spot along the Bow River near home and settled for a site on the banks of the river at the point called Blackfoot Crossing, the traditional heart of the Siksika First Nation land. Here, the Bow River runs north-south for a stretch and the highway crosses the river heading west into the evening twilight, as if off into the sky to meet Venus and Jupiter in conjunction.
I waited until a passing car added the streak of tail lights, heading off into the sunset and starry sky. Nightscapes like this are often best taken when the sky is fairly dark but a longer exposure still brings out the remaining colours of twilight, as well as fainter stars, to make an image enhanced from what the eye might have seen.
— Alan, March 11, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
We have a marvellous sky above us these nights, with an array of brilliant beacons in the evening sky.
This wide-angle scene captures the western and southern sky. To the west at right shine Venus and Jupiter. To the south at centre stands Orion. His famous Belt points up to Taurus and the Pleiades star cluster. His Belt points down to the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius, the Dog Star in Canis Major. Above, at top left, is the other Dog Star, Procyon, in Canis Major.
The last vestige of twilight tints the sky deep blue. But some of the red nebulas in and around Orion are beginning to show up as the sky darkens on a late winter night.
I shot this Saturday night, March 10, on the last evening of Standard Time. Now, I and all astronomers have to wait up another hour to see and shoot the wonders of the night sky. Astronomers hate Daylight Saving Time.
— Alan, March 11, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Venus and Jupiter are getting closer! To each other that is.
This was the scene Saturday night, March 10, two days before Venus (on the right here) and Jupiter reach their close conjunction in the evening twilight sky. I’m amazed how high the pair of objects are at sunset, with Venus much higher in the sky than it normally appears. We haven’t seen Venus as well as this since 2004.
This is a scenic prairie nightscape, with some ramshackle buildings from a 1940s vintage farmstead near my house serving as a foreground setting for the sky scene above. Headlights from a passing car provided some handy and warm illumination to contrast with the cold blue above.
— Alan, March 10, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This is the news maker of the week, the sunspot group known as Region #1429.
It hit the headlines this past week as it let loose several intense solar flares, triggering geomagnetic storms around Earth and some aurora displays. Even as I took this shot of the Sun on Saturday afternoon, through a normal white light filter, Region #1429 was unleashing another intense flare, visible in red H-alpha light as a brilliant bright spot embedded in the dark sunspot. We can expect some more solar storms heading our way, and perhaps displays of northern lights.
The Sun is picking up in activity and there will be lots more of these headline events over the next few years, as the news media latch onto to any story that promises to wreak mayhem and chaos here on Earth. In reality, these events won’t have much effect on us in everyday life except to create beautiful auroras we can admire.
— Alan, March 10, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Here’s Mars, now at its closest and brightest in two years. Look for it due east in the early evening, as a rising reddish star in Leo.
On March 7, the Full Moon sits next to Mars, making for a fine sight as the pair rise together at sunset.
I took this shot March 4, with the Moon just off the frame at the top. Here, the eastbound county road seems to head off across the Prairies to Mars. It’s got a long way to go. Even at its closest right now, Mars is still 100 million kilometres away.
— Alan, March 6, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Look west this week (the first week of March) and you’ll see three planets in a line across the evening sky.
Mercury is lowest in the sky, visible here just above the clouds on the western horizon. It’s bright but easy to miss. To find it, draw a line between Venus and Jupiter and extend the line down and to the right. This week Mercury is putting on its best evening appearance for the year for northern latitudes. You won’t see it higher or brighter than this in 2012.
Farther up the sky is Venus and Jupiter. They are standout objects. As they approach each other over the next week more and more people will suddenly pay attention to them and wonder what they are.
This was the view Sunday night, March 4. The next night a change in the weather brought heavy snow and a blizzard across the Prairies. But clear skies have returned, so enjoy the planets!
— Alan, March 6, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
This was a beautiful night, with the array of five worlds stretched across the sky, a parade of planets and the Moon.
Mercury is now at its greatest angle away from the Sun and easiest to see in the evening sky this week for the year, at least from Canadian latitudes. Even so, it is low in the western twilight.
You can’t miss Venus and Jupiter higher in the west. Watch them close up and trade places in mid-March.
Mars is now at opposition, closest to Earth, and rising at sunset. It shines brightly as a red star in the east, 180° away from Mercury. It will be in our sky for several more months.
Orion shines due south amid the clouds. The arc of clouds rather nicely defines the arc of the ecliptic path across the sky, the path along which we always find the planets.
I took the shots for this panorama on Sunday, March 4. I took five segments, each 13 second exposures with a 16-35mm lens, then combined them in Photoshop CS5 with its Photomerge command.
— Alan, March 4, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Mercury is elusive but here it is, showing up as a speck over the skyline of Calgary, as it begins its best evening appearance of the year, rising a little higher into the twilight sky each night for the next few evenings.
To find it, follow the line down from the Moon and then bright Jupiter and Venus at upper left and continue that line to the lower right. Just to the right of the tallest building (the new Bow tower) and just above the rooftops there’s a tiny dot of light. That’s the inner planet Mercury. It’ll get higher in the first week of March but not by much. Mercury is bright. It’s just not very high and is easy to miss.
But with Mercury coming into view, and with Venus and Jupiter so prominent now in the evening, and Mars now bright in the east after sunset – look for a red star – we have a nice array of 4 naked eye planets across the sky at once. Saturn comes up later after midnight now. So you can see 5 naked eye planets in one night.
It’s a great evening sky show now in early March.
– Alan, March 1, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
The show has been underway for a while but this past weekend anyone with clear skies couldn’t help but notice some beautiful sights in the evening sky. They herald the start of a wonderful late winter and spring of evening celestial scenes.
Tonight, after a snowy weekend that brought winter back to Alberta, skies cleared enough to reveal the waxing crescent Moon next to Jupiter, with both above brilliant Venus. Over the next two weeks watch as Venus and Jupiter converge for a mutual conjunction March 12 to 13. Then on March 25 we’ll see the Moon next to Jupiter and the near Venus the following night, just a month from now.
For the next two weeks we also have Mercury at its best low in the western evening sky and Mars rising in the east at sunset as it reaches its closest point to Earth in two years. It’s a great planetary spring.
Keep looking up!
— Alan, February 26, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Auriga the Charioteer rides high across the northern winter sky these nights. This is a wide-field image I took last week of the constellation that now shines overhead from northern latitudes.
My image takes in all of Auriga, the pentagon-shaped charioteer of Roman mythology, as well as the feet of Gemini the twins, spanning a wide area of the winter Milky Way. Sprinkled along this bit of Milky Way you can see a few clusters of stars. They include four of the best open star clusters in the catalogue of Charles Messier: M35 in Gemini at bottom, and M36, M37 and M38 in Auriga at centre, all wonderful targets for a small telescope. Some of these targets lie in the next spiral arm out from the one we live in.
The star colours show up nicely here, with the brightest star at top appearing a little off white. That’s Capella, 42 light years away and classified as a type G “yellow” star not unlike our own Sun in temperature but much larger – a giant star. Indeed, it is really two yellow-giant stars in close orbit around each other. It’s interesting that Capella doesn’t really show up as yellow. Just like our Sun does to our eyes, Capella appears white because it still emits such a broad range of colours that even though its peak energy does fall in the yellow part of the spectrum, all the other colours remain strong enough that the star looks white to our eyes. Remember, our eyes evolved under the light of a type G star to see all the colours of the spectrum from red to blue.
Only the cool red giant stars take on a yellow or orange hue to our eyes, and to the camera. You can see a few in this image, as well as hot blue stars. The pinky red bits are nebulas in the Milky Way – clouds of hydrogen gas emitting deep red light.
When we look in this direction in the Milky Way we are looking out toward the edge of our Galaxy, exactly opposite the galactic centre.
– Alan, February 21, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
For us in the northern hemisphere, Orion is the very symbol of a winter night, as he stands over snowy landscapes. I took this photo from Lake Louise, in the Rocky Mountains on a chill February night.
Robert Frost, the American poet, describes the inspiring scene of Orion climbing into a winter sky:
“You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.”
_____________________________________
— Alan, February 15, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
While I took this shot three weeks ago, I’ve only just got around to processing it. This is a nebula-filled region of the northern winter sky in the constellation of Monoceros, the unicorn.
The highlight is the rose-like Rosette Nebula at bottom, an interstellar flower of glowing hydrogen where new stars are forming. Above it, at centre, is a mass of pink, blue and deep red nebulosity that forms the Monoceros Complex. All lie in our local corner of the Milky Way, in a spiral arm fragment called the Orion Spur, a hotbed of star formation.
This field, shot with a 135mm telephoto lens, sits to the left of Orion and spans about a hand width at arm’s length. It would take a couple of binocular fields to contain it. Next on my astrophoto agenda – shooting some close ups of selected bits of Monoceros, shots that have eluded me till now.
— Alan, February 12, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Orion sets over Sulphur Mountain and the Banff Springs Hotel in this nightscape from last weekend, February 3.
This is where Banff National Park – indeed the Canadian National Parks system – started, with the founding of a protected enclave around the hot springs and then the hotel, operated at first by the Canadian Pacific Railway, to serve visiting tourists seeking cure-all remedies from the sulphur springs.
Orion and Sirius shine above the Banff landmark, lit, unfortunately, far too brightly by sodium vapour lights. One day the ethic espoused by commercial interests of conserving the environment will extend to the night sky. When we set up telescopes at the Hotel a couple of years ago in honour of Earth Hour, we had to physically cover some lights — they could not be turned off!
So while this shot shows some of the beauty of the night sky from a site like Banff, it also shows what anyone under the veil of all those lights misses. Half the environment of the mountains.
— Alan, February 10, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Here’s the Full Moon of February rising over the place I work, the science centre in Calgary, called TELUS Spark.
I took this Tuesday evening, February 7, on the night of what is sometimes called the Snow Moon. I knew the Full Moon would rise in the northeast and worked out, with the help of a useful iPad app, just where to stand on the hill above the science centre to get the Moon rising over the science centre. Though it did take a last minute move of a hundred feet to place the Moon over the front entrance!
The building glows from the light of banks of LEDs that can be programmed to slowly change colour. The parking lot lights are all nicely shielded, as any astronomically friendly place should be, to prevent light spilling upward. The odd structure to the left contains the new digital dome theatre, which opens this spring. The dome screen is being installed this month. The dome will feature a Digistar 4 projection system with two pairs of very high-end Sony 4K video projectors, for interactive star shows and full-dome movies. Maybe even laser shows!
Should be fun!
— Alan, February 8, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
A train winds through the Rockies, seemingly headed for Venus!
I took this shot last Saturday night at one of my favourite photo stops in Banff, the famed Morant’s Curve on the Bow Valley Parkway. This was the spot made famous in the 1930s and 1940s by CPR photographer Nicholas Morant who hauled his large format view camera around western Canada shooting scenes of the Canadian Pacific Railway and classic steam engines at work hauling through the Rockies. At this location the train winds alongside the Bow River heading up to the continental divide marked by the line of peaks in the distance.
On this night, Venus shone brightly over the peaks surrounding Lake Louise. A westbound train heads off into the distance. In a few minutes it’ll be over the divide and descending Kicking Horse Pass into Field, B.C. and Yoho National Park. It’ll never reach Venus!
— Alan, February 7, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
I love the lighting in this shot from Saturday night. I took this by standing out on Lake Louise, from a spot you couldn’t be in summer without getting wet!
Moonlight grazes the east and north slopes of Mount Fairview, while spill from a skating rink flood lamp lights the trees. The sky is deep blue from moonlight making this look like a day scene.
But this is actually a 4-minute exposure, purposely long to allow the stars of Orion and the bright star Sirius at left to trail across the heavens over Fairview.
Unlike most nightscape shots, of necessity taken at high ISO speeds to grab lots of light in a short exposure, I took this shot at ISO 100. Even with the blog’s low resolution images, I think you can see the difference here – this slow-speed shot looks richer and smoother, lacking the fine noise that is inevitable in high ISO shots. It’s just like using slow speed film – in the old days I’d always carry two types of film for trips like this: slow Velvia 50 for long star trail shots, and fast Fuji or Ektachrome 400 for the untrailed nightscapes. I always loved the Velvia shots – they were indeed like smooth velvet.
Now with digital cameras you can switch settings as you like. And see the results instantly. How did we ever manage to get any results with film?
— Alan, February 6, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Moments before taking the photo featured in the previous blog I captured this scene, from the footbridge over Louise Creek flowing out of Lake Louise.
This is one of the world’s great photo spots, but here the scene is lit by moonlight and by the Chateau’s and skating rink lights. Jupiter is the bright object above Mt. St. Piran at right.
This was a magical night. Just step away from the artificial lights, let your eyes adjust and a stunning nightscape appeared. Compare this scene to the one I shot from a few steps away but in August and featured in my blog Lake Louise by Moonlight. The blue glacial waters of the summer scene are here replaced by snow and ice.
— Alan, February 5, 2012 / © 2012 Alan Dyer
Here’s a picture postcard winter scene, one that thousands of people walk by each day — by day.
This is the Swiss guide cabin at Lake Louise, but seen at night. Light from the Moon just off the frame at top illuminates the scene, while Orion stands in the sky over the cabin and Mount Fairview.
I took this shot Saturday night, February 4, 2012, as one of many shots that night at Lake Louise, under crystal clear skies. It was a winter wonderland and a night photographer’s paradise.
Nightscape shots like this are surprisingly easy to take — typically being 20 to 40 seconds at f/2 to f/4 and ISO 400 to 800 with a good DSLR. The exact settings depend on how bright the Moon is. I used the Canon 5D MkII and 24mm Canon lens, a fine combination for night shooting.
— Alan, February 5, 2012 / © @2012 Alan Dyer
Who says the dark night sky isn’t colourful? Of course, to the naked eye it mostly is, with the darkness punctuated only with a few red, yellow and blues stars. But expose a camera for long enough and all kinds of colour begins to appear.
This region is above us now, in the Northern Hemisphere evening sky for mid-winter. It’s the boundary area between Taurus and Perseus. Below are the vivid blues of the hot young Pleiades star cluster in Taurus. At top, just squeezing into the frame, is the shocking pink of the California Nebula, a glowing cloud of hydrogen gas in Perseus.
But between are the subtle hues of faint nebulosity weaving all through the Perseus-Taurus border zone. Below are faint cyans and blues from dust clouds reflecting the light of the Pleiades stars. In the middle are the yellow-browns of dark dust clouds hardly emitting light at all, but snaking across the frame to end in a complex of pink and blue straddling the border collectively known as IC 348 and IC 1333. At top, the glowing hydrogen gas of the California emits a mix of red and blue wavelengths, creating the hot pink tones, but fading to a deeper red to the left as the nebula thins out to the east. Throughout, hot blue stars pepper the sky and help illuminate the dust and gas clouds which will likely form more hot stars in the eons to come.
I took this shot last Wednesday night, on one of the few clear, haze-free nights of late. This is a “piggybacked shot,” with the Canon 5D MkII camera going along for the ride on one of my tracking mounts. This final shot is a stack of five 6-minute exposures, highly processed to bring out the faint clouds barely brighter than the sky itself. The camera was equipped with a 135mm telephoto lens, giving a field of view a couple of binocular fields wide. Hold out your hand and your outstretched palm would nicely cover this area of sky. But only the camera reveals what is actually there.
— Alan, January 29, 2012 / Image © 2012 Alan Dyer
Following up on my previous post, here is the wide-angle scene of that same winter moonrise, taken at sunset on January 8, 2012.
This was a spectacular and truly “amazing sky,” with the last rays of the setting Sun illuminating the clouds and the rising Full Moon coming up in the pinks and blues of twilight. It is the big prairie sky at its best.
The wide scene captures dark cloud shadows converging toward the point opposite the Sun, near where the Full Moon sits. These are “crepuscular rays,” a common sight at sunset or sunrise.
— Alan, January 8, 2012 / Image © 2012 Alan Dyer
Here is the January 2012 Full Moon rising above a decidedly un-January landscape in southern Alberta. A recent spell of unseasonably mild weather has eaten most of the snow, leaving the fields yellow-brown, and a fine colour contrast with the twilight sky.
On January 8 the Full Moon rose into clear skies over the prairie landscape east of my home. This shot captures the pink glow of twilight on the upper atmosphere, above the rising blue rim of Earth’s shadow just on the horizon. A month ago, the Full Moon was in that shadow out in space, being eclipsed at sunrise. Here it is rising at sunset, one lunar cycle later.
I like the prairies, not only for the flat horizons and big open skies they provide, but also for the wonderful palette of colours on Earth and sky.
— Alan, January 8, 2012 / Image © 2012 Alan Dyer
Happy New Year to all! To mark the first day of 2012 here is a view of the quarter Moon as it appeared in the early evening twilight on January 1, 2012.
The coming year promises to be a superb one for stargazing with:
• a wonderful evening appearance of Venus in March and April, including a rare passage through the Pleiades star cluster on April 3
• an array of 5 planets in the evening sky in March
• a partial eclipse of the Sun May 20 (annular if you travel to the SW United States)
• a partial eclipse of the Moon June 4 (at dawn for western North America)
• an amazingly rare transit of Venus on June 5 (North American time)
• a fine year for the Perseid meteors August 12/13
• a daytime occultation of Venus on August 13 (for North America)
• a total eclipse of the Sun from Australia and the South Pacific
• a host of fine Moon and planet conjunctions throughout the year
• and no doubt some fine displays of Northern Lights as the Sun picks up in activity toward its predicted 2013 maximum.
So there should be lots to shoot and blog about in 2012. In 2011, since I started this blog in February, my Amazing Sky blog has served up 103 posts and 14,000 image views, seen by people on 6 continents — I have yet to break into Antarctica! Perhaps in 2012.
Clear skies to all!
— Alan, January 1, 2012 / Image © 2012 by Alan Dyer
This is my favourite shot from the December 10 dawn eclipse. It’s the one I was after, with the red Moon in a blue sky over the snow-covered Rockies.
Lunar eclipses don’t have the dramatic and sudden effects of a total eclipse of the Sun. But neither do they have the anxiety and sometimes sheer panic! Lunar eclipses are more stately affairs as they play out in a relaxed manner over 2 to 3 hours. But they are beautiful nonetheless, especially when the Moon is low in the sky and set above a scenic landscape at moonrise or, as it was with this eclipse, at moonset.
The red colouration of the Moon makes the scene, as the Moon, embedded in Earth’s shadow, becomes lit by the light of all the sunsets and sunrises going on around the world at once. If Earth had no atmosphere the Moon would go completely black during a total eclipse. But besides making life on Earth possible (no small thing!), our atmosphere also provides us the wonderful sight of a red Moon during a total eclipse. Take a deep breath and enjoy!
— Alan, December 10, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This was the view well into totality as the eclipsed Moon set into the morning twilight sky. On December 10 we got a fantastic view of the total lunar eclipse at dawn, with the red Moon over the Rockies.
I shot this from the grounds of the Rothney Observatory in the foothills southwest of Calgary. The Moon is completely in Earth’s shadow here but with its southern or bottom edge brighter than the top, so it overexposes here. This view captures the scene as the eye saw it, at about 7:30 a.m. local time, an hour before sunrise and moonset.
A full house of 100 people showed up at the Observatory for a public event and breakfast. I dare say they got the best view of this eclipse of anyone in Canada.
— Alan, December 10, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
It has been a long time between Blog posts, with no new astrophotos from me for a while. But the drought ends due to thankfully fine conditions for the total eclipse of the Moon, on Saturday morning, December 10.
Skies were wonderful and the conditions actually pleasant for a winter morning at 6 a.m. For us in southern Alberta, the Moon went into eclipse as it descended into the western sky in the pre-dawn hours. The timing wasn’t convenient, but the view more than made up for the effort of getting up at 3 a.m. to drive west out of cloud to the Rothney Observatory. Their location in the foothills proved clear and perfect for looking west, to see the Moon over the Rockies.
This is one of my earlier shots in the 3-hour event, taken just before totality began, when the Moon was still in a dark sky. The camera was on a tracking platform to keep the stars from trailing during the 30 second exposure, causing the ground to trail instead.
You can see the Pleiades cluster at right, and Betelgeuse in Orion at left.
This was the last total eclipse of the Moon anywhere in the world until April 14, 2014.
— Alan, December 10, 2011 / Image © Alan Dyer 2011
I’m getting the hang of shooting demanding day-to-night time-lapse movies!
For this clip I shot over 2.5 hours, using a fish-eye lens, to create a sequence suitable for projection in a digital planetarium dome.
But the trick with these day-to-night sequences is getting a smooth transition in exposures, which can range over 12 to 16 f-stops, from short snapshot exposures with the lens stopped all the way down at the start before sunset, to long 8-second exposures with the lens wide open at night, plus the camera’s ISO speed increasing from a slow ISO 100 to a faster ISO 400 or more at select points through the sequence as well.
The secret to doing this is a control box called the Little Bramper, an intervalometer that fires the shutter automatically at set intervals but also gradually ramps the exposure time a tad longer with each successive exposure. This was my third time out with the Bramper, and I more or less got it right this time!
While the Bramper does a great job running the camera, it still takes a lot of manual oversight to control its ramping rate so the exposures don’t get too long and overexpose the scene, or fail to get long enough to track the darkening sky.
At several points in the sequence it is also necessary to quickly (in one exposure cycle) half the exposure time, while at the same time opening up the lens a stop, or doubling the ISO, so that the ever-lengthening exposure doesn’t get too long and collide with the interval between exposures. In this case, shots were taken about 12 seconds apart, so the maximum exposure for each frame couldn’t be much more than 8 to 10 seconds.
The end result of the work is a time-lapse movie that shows the setting Sun, then the lights of Calgary coming on as the sky darkens. Clouds lit by the yellow glow of streetlights move in, then blow away again to reveal a few stars in the urban sky.
— Alan, October 16, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer
In honour of Canadian Thanksgiving, here’s a shot from last night of a classic little church on the Canadian Prairie.
This is the long abandoned Catholic church at the hamlet of Dorothy, Alberta. The church was built in 1944, but as the coal mines in the Drumheller valley shut down (blame the invention of Diesel trains and the discovery of natural gas in Alberta) the once bustling town of Dorothy decayed into a ghost town. A few people still live there, but its main attractions are its relics of the pioneer age — this church, and the United church next to it (behind the camera), a picturesque grain elevator, and an old store. The companion United church has been restored, but this little church on the prairie, abandoned since 1967, awaits restoration.
The scene is lit by the gibbous Moon, and by a couple of sodium vapour streetlights, ubiquitous even in a ghost town.
In the sky are the stars of the Big Dipper and Polaris above the church.
This is one frame of 300 I shot over three hours as part of a motion-controlled time-lapse movie.
Happy Thanksgiving!
— Alan, October 10, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
Spiral galaxies are icons of deep space. This one is a classic. This is the Triangulum Galaxy, named for its home constellation. Amateur astronomers also know it as M33, the 33rd entry in Charles Messier’s catalog of deep sky objects compiled in the 1780s. To Messier, object #33 was another fuzzy spot he and others might confuse for comets, the objects astronomers of the day were really after.
It wasn’t until 1850 that the Earl of Rosse, observing with his monster Leviathan of Parsonstown, a 72-inch reflector telescope, managed to see M33 as something more than a nebulous glow. He saw what the photo clearly shows — spiral arms swirling around a central core. However, in those days, such “spiral nebulae” were thought to be whirlpools of gas where stars and solar systems were forming.
It wasn’t until the 1920s, with the work of Edwin Hubble, that objects like M33 were proven to be other galaxies like our Milky Way, each composed of billions of stars.
We now know the Triangulum Galaxy lies about 3 million light years away, and is about half the size of our Milky Way. That makes it the third largest member of our Local Group of galaxies, after our own Milky Way and the famous Andromeda Galaxy.
For this shot of M33, taken September 25, I stacked 6 images, each a 12-minute exposure at ISO 800 and f/6, shot with my Astro-Physics 130mm refractor and Canon 7D camera. Visible along the galaxy’s spiral arms you can see some of the reddish and cyan-coloured nebulas that are sites of active star formation in M33.
— Alan, Oct 7, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
These stars are as much a part of autumn in the northern hemisphere as are the changing colours of leaves and the flying south of geese.
These are the stars of legend, outlining the mythical constellations of Queen Cassiopeia (at top left), her daughter Andromeda (arcing across the bottom half of the image), and the hero Perseus (the stars at lower left) who rescued Andromeda from the ravages of Cetus the sea monster.
These stars are now high in the east in the evening sky, heralding the start of autumn and the return of frosty nights.
There are lots to see with binoculars or a telescope in these constellations. Look around this image and you can pick out several clumps, or clusters, of stars in Perseus and Andromeda. But the most obvious object is the oval-shaped Andromeda Galaxy, visible to the unaided eye from dark rural skies. This is the nearest sizeable galaxy to our Milky Way, and yet its light still takes 2.5 million years to reach us.
I took this shot earlier this week during a run of clear and warm autumn nights, perhaps the last before the chill nights of fall come on. It’s a wide-angle shot with a 35mm lens and Canon 5D MkII camera, tracked for a stack of four 6-minute exposures plus a fifth taken with a soft-focus filter.
— Alan, October 1, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
When the Summer Triangle sinks into the west, we know summer has come to an end. While the stars of the Summer Triangle are now high overhead from northern latitudes as the sky gets dark, by late evening the Summer Triangle is setting into the west.
These three bright stars are an example of stellar variety:
– At bottom is Altair in Aquila the eagle. It’s a white main-sequence star 17 light years away, fairly nearby by stellar standards. Leslie Nielson and his crew went to Altair in the 1950s movie Forbidden Planet.
– At top right is Vega, in Lyra the harp, a hotter and more luminous blue-white star than Altair, making it appear brighter than Altair, despite Vega being farther away, at 25 light years distant. Jodi Foster went to Vega in the movie Contact.
– But the third member of the Triangle, Deneb, at top left, is an extreme star. It appears a little fainter than Vega, but looks can be deceiving. Deneb is actually a luminous supergiant star, putting out 54,000 times the energy of our Sun. Deneb is about 1,400 light years away and yet, due to its fierce output of light, appears almost as bright as Vega. Light from Deneb left that star in the 6th century. I don’t know of any movie heroes who went to Deneb. The name means “tail of the Swan,” hardly a romantic destination for space-faring adventurers.
Look toward the Summer Triangle and you are looking down the spiral arm of the Milky Way that we live in. The stars of that arm appear as a packed stellar cloud running through Cygnus the swan, the constellation that contains Deneb.
I took this shot Saturday night, from home, on what turned out to be a very clear night, once some clouds got out of the way in the early evening. This is a 4-image stack of 8-minute exposures, at f/4 with the 35mm Canon lens, a favourite of mine, on the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800. I added in exposures taken through a soft-focus filter to give the added glows around the stars to help make the bright stars and their colours more visible.
— Alan, September 25, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This is a shot I’ve been after for several years, usually from this same location, looking west toward the setting Sun.
This is sunset at the autumnal equinox, with the Sun going down due west, something it does only at the two equinoxes. September’s usually the one with clear skies, as it was this night, Sept 23, 2011. Except for some annoying clouds at the horizon over the Rockies to the west. I was hoping for a clear shot of the Sun right at sunset at the end of Highway 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. But it’s close. Better luck next year!
After today, the Sun will be setting south of west, and the days will become shorter than the nights.
This is a 6-image HDR stack to capture both the bright and dark parts of the scene. It worked, but Photoshop refused to properly remove the “ghosts” — images from cars moving from shot to shot. But if I hadn’t told you about it, you might not have noticed!
— Alan, September 23, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This was the scene from my rural backyard on Tuesday night, September 20, with the Milky Way at its best across the sky.
September usually brings the best nights of the year for dark-sky observing and shooting the Milky Way. Nights are clear, dry, and transparent. The Milky Way stretches across the sky from southwest to northeast in the early evening.
Under clear skies on Tuesday the dark lanes and structure of the Milky Way really stood out, both to the eye and to the camera. Image processing for contrast does bring out the dust lanes, including the subtle patches off the main Milky Way band.
The centre of the image contains the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle. They frame the bright Cygnus starclouds and glowing red nebulas that mark the spiral arm that we live in. Above, at top left in the image, is a bluer section of the Milky Way formed by the more distant Perseus spiral arm, the one further out from us in the Galaxy.
I took this shot with the Canon 5D MkII and Canon 15mm lens, for a stack of five 6-minute exposures at f/4 and ISO 800.
— Alan, September 21, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
It was a marvellous night for the Milky Way … and some Saturday Night Stargazing.
This was the scene at the University of Calgary’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory on Saturday night (Sept 17, 2011) as a crowd of about 250 people took in the wonders of the night sky at one of the Observatory’s monthly Open Houses. Skies were excellent and a late moonrise left dark skies early on for views of the Milky Way, a seldom seen part of nature for city-dwellers. A dozen volunteers from the local chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada provided telescopes and expertise to tour people around night sky wonders, from comets to star clusters. Many people are delighted just to have the constellations pointed out, so they can identify the patterns whose names they have heard of but have never seen.
What always impresses me about such events is how much interest the public shows, and how much the kids in attendance know about astronomy and space. One young man, age 10 or so, in seeing some of the images, like this one, that I was taking pop up on my camera screen, asked if I do piggyback photography! At his age I’m not sure I knew about piggyback photography!
We see all ages at our public stargazing events, all expressing the same “Wow! That’s cool!” reaction. Hearing the comments gives us astronomers a charge — we get as much back from the guests as we hope we provide them.
— Alan, Sept. 18, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
I’ve been taking lots of time-lapse movies of late. But this one is a time-lapse movie of my other camera taking a time-lapse movie.
Here you see my Canon 7D camera riding aboard my latest tool (or toy!), a motion-control dolly. The camera takes its series of still images (that will be later stitched together into a movie) while it tracks down a rail, riding on a motorized cart.
The unit is called the Stage Zero Dolly, from Dynamic Perception LLC. It is a nifty device that fires the camera shutter for the exposure time and interval you desire. In between each exposure it also moves the camera a small amount down the track. The result can be seen in the next blog, a time-lapse movie with a changing perspective, giving a cinema-style dolly shot. Except, I took this one over 3 hours.
While this scene might look like I took it during the day, it is the middle of the night (witness the moving stars). The blue sky is due to moonlight, from an almost Full Moon on September 10.
The Stage Zero Dolly takes some work to set up and program right, but the results open up a whole new dimension (literally!) in time-lapse shooting.
— Alan, September 12, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer
What a night this was! This was the view Sunday night, September 4, from the Peyto Lake viewpoint, of the Milky Way arching overhead, on a clear night at 7,000 feet altitude near the timberline of Bow Summit.
This is one frame of 275 of a time-lapse movie I took of the stars turning over Peyto Lake. This frame catches the Moon just as it sets over Peyto Glacier at left. At this altitude the Milky Way was obvious even with the Moon still in the sky.
It was a scene of a starry night that Bill Peyto would have enjoyed. As he wrote of nearby Bow Lake (see my shot here) … “Around the fire tonight Jim [Jimmy Simpson] said that for his money this campsite was the closest one could get to Heaven on Earth and I reckon he’s not far wrong.”
— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
After taking the twilight shots at Waterfowl Lakes on Sunday night (click back to the previous blog), I continued up the Icefields Parkway, ascending to Bow Summit and the viewpoint that overlooks one of the most famous scenes in the Canadian Rockies, Peyto Lake.
Named for legendary mountain man and guide Bill Peyto, the lake was a favourite place for him, to give him solitude away from the madding crowds of Banff.
As with so many of these places, by day this very spot swarms with tourists by the bus load. Peyto would have cringed. But at nightfall, I am the only one there, enjoying the stars coming out in the solitude of the darkening sky.
Here, we look north, to the Big Dipper and Arcturus over the lake in the valley below.
This is a single exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 800 with the Canon 7D and 10-22mm lens.
— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
About half an hour after I took the previous blog entry image, I was here on Sunday evening, farther down the Icefields Parkway, at the shore of Lower Waterfowl Lake. The peak is Mt. Cephren.
The Sun had set and the sky was now filled with the purple glow of twilight marking the beginning of an exceptionally clear night.
Capturing this scene as the eye saw it took a stack of 7 different exposures, combined in what is known as a High Dynamic Range image, that blends the shadows details in the foreground without losing the subtle tints of the bright sky.
— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This is how the night started, on Sunday evening, September 4 — as clear a night as you could ask for in the mountains. A quarter Moon hangs over the peaks of the Continental Divide, with alpen glow, the last rays of the Sun, illuminating the mountains around Saskatchewan River Crossing, in Banff.
The North Saskatchewan River flows east out of the mountains here, after being joined by the Mistaya and Howse rivers. It was here, in the early 1800s, that David Thompson and his party of fur traders from the North West Company entered the Rockies and heading up over Howse Pass off frame to the right, to trade with the Kootenays in the interior of what is now British Columbia.
This is David Thompson country, named for one of the world’s greatest geographers and mapmakers. He mapped most of western Canada and down into the Oregon Territory. All using compasses, sextants, a Dolland refractor telescope (to observe the moons of Jupiter for telling time), and his skills as an astronomer. The Kootenays called him Koo-Koo-Sint — the man who watches the stars.
It was also here, on these open river plains, that James Hector, mapping southern Alberta with the Palliser Expedition, observed Comet Donati in September 1858.
This is a place in the Rockies with many ties to history and to astronomy.
— Alan, September 5, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
Here is the time-lapse movie I took last Saturday night, August 20, on a perfect night at Bow Lake in Banff, Alberta.
The sequence starts in bright twilight then darkens to full night with the Milky Way over the mountain silhouettes. The peaks then light up as they catch the light of the rising last quarter Moon coming up about 11:30 pm in the east. The moonlight creeps down the mountains to light up the entire valley and the lake. The sky brightens to deep blue again. The sequence ends about 3:30 am.
There was hardly a cloud in the sky all night, unusual for locations near the large icefields that straddle the continental divide.
I assembled the movie from 454 frames, each 40 seconds in exposure time, and taken 1 second apart.
— Alan, August 24, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer
This was a truly magical scene — the Milky Way over Bow Glacier, and mountains lit by moonlight and reflected in the waters of Bow Lake.
Last Saturday night, August 20, 2011, brought some of the clearest skies I’ve seen in the Rockies. To take advantage of them, I headed to Bow Lake, in Banff, a favourite and very photogenic location for day and nighttime shooting. I hadn’t been there at night since the film days, pre-2004.
This shot is one of 450 frames taken as part of a time-lapse sequence, showing the Milky Way moving over Bow Lake. Here, at about 2 a.m. the light from the rising last quarter Moon is illuminating the peaks, and the Milky Way is perfectly placed over the end of Bow Lake and Bow Glacier, source of the waters of the Bow River and what Calgarians drink!
The sky is blue from moonlight. Last quarter moons are wonderful for nightscapes — providing enough light to illuminate the landscape but not so much as to wash out the sky and Milky Way. But making use of that phase of the Moon means very late nights of shooting. I packed it in this night at 4 a.m.
— Alan, August 22, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This was the view Friday night, August 19, 2011, as the International Space Station flew over Banff, Alberta and the Canadian Rockies.
I took this shot (actually this is a composite of three successive exposures) from the viewpoint on Mt. Norquay overlooking the Banff townsite and the Trans-Canada Highway interchange, unfortunately all too well lit. This might well be a case study in light pollution as well.
But the lights in the valley don’t diminish the Milky Way above, and the sky-wide streak created by the passage from west to east of the Space Station. What looks like a brilliant star to the eye turns into a streak here due to the three 45-second time exposures I used to capture this scene. The lens is the 8mm fish-eye, and these frames are from a 400-frame time-lapse movie for the planetarium dome.
— Alan, August 20, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
Here is the time-lapse movie I took last Saturday night at Lake Louise, Alberta, under the light of the Full Moon. My previous blog featured a still frame from the beginning of this sequence.
The night starts clear, but as often happens, clouds move in, blowing off the cold icefields of the continental divide. It does make for a nice effect in time-lapse, one of few instances in astronomy where some clouds can be useful!
Also notice how the reflection disappears as the lake breaks up into waves briefly, as wind blows in now and then through the night. The Full Moon is rising behind the camera, causing the lake to light up as moonlight illuminates more of the lake’s surface. Shadows move across the mountainsides. Arcturus is the bright star setting at right. The red object at left is a moored canoe, moving about on the lake.
I took this movie over 4 hours from 10:30 pm to 2:30 am, taking 477 frames with the Canon 7D and 10mm lens. For time-lapse movies like this, I process the full-size RAW files in Adobe Camera Raw and Bridge, then use Photoshop’s Image Processor to export them all to smaller size JPGs. From that set, I use Photoshop CS5 Extended’s “Motion” feature to assemble the folder of JPGs into a movie, in this case at 24 frames per second, a little fast perhaps for this sequence, but it’s easy to change if needed. Photoshop then renders that image file out as a Quicktime movie. What you see here is a tiny version of the final HD-sized video.
— Alan, August 16, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer
This has to be one of the most photogenic and photographed places in the world. Here it is in a different light, moonlight.
This is Lake Louise, in Banff National Park, Alberta. A few hours before I took this photo on Saturday, August 13, where I stood would have been swarming with thousands of people. But at midnight there was no one about. I had the view to myself.
This looks like a daytime shot, except the stars give it away. Instead, it is the Full Moon, behind the camera, providing the illumination. Contrary to Hollywood lighting clichés, moonlight is not blue. It is the same colour as sunlight, because it is sunlight, just much fainter, reflected off the Moon’s neutral grey surface.
In this view we are looking southwest, toward the stars of the summer sky setting behind the peaks of the continental divide. Arcturus is the bright star at right.
A calm night provided the glassy lake to reflect Mount Victoria and Victoria Glacier.
This is one frame of 477 30-second exposures I took over 4 hours, of the stars turning and eventually clouds blowing in across the sky from the icefields over the divide. It’s rare to get such a perfectly clear night in the Rockies. It was a wonderful to be there, and apparently to be the only one there, to experience it.
— Alan, August 14, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This is one for the time-lapse geeks!
One of the trickiest subjects for a time-lapse sequence is a smooth and seamless day-to-night transition. Exposure times vary from fractions of a second before sunset to several seconds at night fall.
How to do it? Manually shifting exposures is too much work and prone to error. Putting the camera on Automatic can work but inevitably results in an effect known in the time-lapse world as “flickering.” The camera’s automatically-judged exposures aren’t consistent from frame to frame so the final movie shows minor bright/dark flickering, making it look jerky.
For this test sequence of sunset over the Calgary skyline, I tried a new toy for the first time, as a solution.
The device is called the Little Bramper (for Bulb Ramping). It is a custom-made intervalometer that fires the camera shutter every few seconds (at whatever interval you desire). Nothing new there. But what’s unique is that it can be set to slowly increment the exposure time by as little as 1/1000th of a second from frame to frame, gradually increasing the exposure (“ramping” it) to accommodate the darkening scene. The result is a smooth transition from day to night with no flickering.
This was my first use of the Bramper and it wasn’t without its glitches. The shortest exposure the Bramper can provide (it always controls the camera thru its Bulb setting) is about 1/10th of a second (I had no idea camera shutters can fire as quickly as that even on Bulb).
But at the beginning of a sequence like this, with a bright sky, achieving that exposure (still quite long) means using a small f-stop, a slow ISO speed, or a neutral density filter, or all of the above. But as the sky darkens and exposures lengthen, exposures would become too long to fit within the desired interval between frames (typically no more than 5 to 10 seconds for a smooth sequence). So, to shorten the exposures you then have to open up the lens, switch to a faster ISO, or remove the ND filter, while also commanding the Bramper to quickly reduce its exposure time, all in one exposure cycle (i.e. 5 to 10 seconds) so as not to lose or ruin frames. Takes some coordination and practice (hit the Bramper’s button, adjust the camera, all within 5 seconds), and I didn’t get it right the first couple of times.
But overall, for a first test, the sequence turned out very well. The $80 Little Bramper does the job, though it does take careful monitoring through the sequence, not just to perform the exposure swaps, but to also watch that the ramping rate (adjustable on the fly) matches what the scene is doing and you aren’t under- or over-exposing. It’ll take a little more practice, but the results certainly are worth it.
It’s another neat tool in the time-lapse arsenal.
— Alan, August 10, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer
It’s rare to get such a clear night in the mountains but I used the opportunity last Thursday night to shoot the Milky Way in a twilight scene in Banff National Park.
I took this a little later on the same night as the previous blog’s image of the setting Moon. The location is the Vermilion Lakes, a familiar scenic spot for classic views of Banff and Mount Rundle reflected in the water, at far left. It is one of the few places in the mountains where you can look south over a low mountain skyline (to see the southern Milky Way) and over still water (to get reflections).
For this shot I used a fish-eye lens to record most of the sky and the summer Milky Way arching over the water. The sky was dark enough to show the Milky Way but still had a lingering blue tint from the last glow of deep twilight. The yellow glow at left to the east is from the urban lights of Banff.
The still image is one frame of 220 shot over 4 hours for a time-lapse video, for projection in a full-dome video-equipped planetarium. Just so happens we’re building one in Calgary to open in early 2012.
— Alan, August 9, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
I’ve been chasing the Moon this week. I caught up with it last Thursday night, August 4, in Banff, with the waxing crescent Moon low in the southwest at dusk.
The location is the upper Vermilion Lake just outside the Banff townsite. The golden reflection of the low Moon on the water, the slope of the mountainside and its reflection, the dock and steps, and the tail lights from a vehicle on Highway 1 just up the hill (I decided to leave them in!) make for what I think is an interesting composition of converging lines.
I got set up and in position just in time to catch the scene at the magic hour of twilight, when the sky is dark enough the show deep colours and the Moon’s entire disk shows up, but before the sky gets too dark and the Moon too bright to make an interesting scene.
Even so, the contrast in such a scene is still very high. So to capture it more as your eye would have seen it I used a stack of five exposures, taken in rapid succession, each 2/3rds of an f-stop apart. I then merged the frames with Photoshop’s High Dynamic Range routine to create a scene that brings out detail in the foreground without overexposing the Moon and sky.
A technical method to capture a simple scene of serenity in the mountains.
— Alan, August 7, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
As all the other sunset photographers were packing up for the night, I was just getting started. This is the scene last night, with the waxing Moon hanging over the moonscape of Dinosaur Provincial Park in southern Alberta.
I took this in deep twilight, when the sky is tinted with subtle colours complementing the earth tones of the landscape below.
Dinosaur Park is the world’s best repository of late Cretaceous fossils, being unearthed as the terrain made of ancient volcanic ash erodes away with every rainstorm. Though the formations date from the Cretaceous some 70 million years ago when this area of Alberta was a bayou-like swamp, the badlands landscape we see today was created at the end of the last ice age when glacial floods poured over the landscape, carving the channels occupied by rivers today, like the Red Deer River that flows through Dinosaur Park.
It’s a favourite spot of mine, just an hour east of where I live, to shoot sunsets and moonrises, and twilight landscapes like this one.
— Alan, August 7, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
Here is nearly two hours of auroral dancing compressed into 25 seconds.
This was the “all-sky” aurora of August 5/6, 2011, widely seen over North America but perhaps (from early reports) best from the western half, especially Canada, favoured for Northern Lights due to our latitude.
I shot this with the 8mm fish-eye lens and the Canon 5D MkII. The movie consists of 255 frames, each 24 to 30 seconds in exposure duration, taken one second apart. ISO speed was 1600 and aperture f/3.5. The playback frame rate is 10 fps.
This display was quite chaotic, without the graceful rippling curtains present in many displays, but rather huge patches of sky turning off and on. This is typical of an aurora in the declining part of the storm — it had already been raging for several hours by the time it got dark here in Alberta.
Nor was the display very bright, so the longer exposures needed to record it well further blur any fine motion. Nevertheless, you get a good idea of the intense activity this aurora displayed. The magnetosphere was jumping last night!
— Alan, August 6, 2011 / Movie © 2011 Alan Dyer
It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen a display of Northern Lights as good as this one. But with the Sun picking up in activity from a record lull in the last few years, great all-sky displays like this might become more frequent.
The last time I saw aurora cover most of the sky like it did last night (August 5) was back in the days of shooting film. So this was the first chance I had to shoot an all-sky aurora with digital cameras. This is with the Canon 7D and the ultra-wide 10-22mm zoom. I also shot with the fish-eye 8mm, and an “all-sky” movie of those frames will be in the next posting.
This display was widely seen and predicted, as solar monitoring satellites had observed major flares on the Sun earlier in the week and tracked the resulting “coronal mass ejections” across the solar system. We knew they were aimed at Earth and would hit August 5. In this case, the resulting geomagnetic storm raged for long enough that people across a wide swath of longitudes from Europe to North America were able to see the display during their local night, August 5/6. Even people in the northern U.S. had a good look.
While the display was certainly active and extensive it never did get really bright. So this one still falls short of the “10 out 10” scale for spectacle. Nevertheless, as digital cameras can do so well, the images picked up the greens from glowing oxygen with remarkable intensity. More interesting are the purples, seen toward the beginning of the night but then they faded away. The purple tints come from the tops of the towering curtains of aurora which often glow red from nitrogen molecules at very high altitudes being charged up and excited. But the tops of the curtains can also be lit by sunlight. The blue from the sunlight and the red from the aurora itself mix to produce a purple tint. Only the camera picked this up.
— Alan, August 6, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
This is one of the great places for evoking the wide open spaces of the high plains. Here we are looking south over the Milk River and the rock formations of Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in Alberta to the peaks of the Sweetgrass Hills in Montana. The buildings at right are the modern reconstructions of the late 1800’s North West Mounted Police outpost that guarded Canada from the illegals from the U.S. (!) coming up Police Coulee smuggling whiskey from Montana into Canada.
The time is just after sunset, as the last light of the Sun still illuminates the clouds. This is the magic hour for photography, and for taking in the solitude of the “Great Lone Land” as author William Francis Butler described it in his book of that title in 1872.
As Butler wrote, “No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets; no solitude can equal the loneliness of a night-shadowed prairie…”
— Alan, July 27, 2011 / Image © 2011 Alan Dyer
The Amazing Sky 
