An Interesting Night Scene...

Here is an example of an interesting night sky scene, but one that doesn't quite make the final astronomy portfolio.  It is a patch of sky just off of the bright star Rigel of the constellation Orion.  The nebula is referred to commonly as the Witch Head Nebula for obvious reasons and can be found by searching for IC 2118 in astronomical data banks.  The nebula is remnance of dust and gas from a prior supernova in the area.  The object itself is in the constellation Eridanus.  The image is fine to look at, but does not make the final cut for portfolio print quality.  The data simply isn't strong enough for print and the composition isn't quite strong enough.  This will be one of my targets for the upcoming Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys in February.  The Takahashi FSQ 85 with reducer should provide just the right composition, although I may have to go to a 200mm lens as well.  Just another example of the many hours that go into images that you may or may not see in final print and on the portfoio pages.  Thank goodness that blogs at least give some of these images a home.  Take care. 

Technical details:  The image was captured during the Winter Star Party 2009 in the Florida Keys.  Telescope was a TMB 92SS with Televue focal reducer/flattener in place.  The camera was a modified Canon 450D.  30 images of 4 minutes duration were stacked in Images Plus after RAW conversion in Adobe Light Room 2.5.  All enhancements were made within Adobe Photoshop CS4. 

A Winter Day in Ritter Park, Huntington, WV

A quiet winter day in Ritter Park with hardly anyone else around is as good as photography gets in Huntington, WV.  A winter storm that glanced through our area delivered 4 inches of heavy-wet snow and provided a wonderful photographic opportunity in Huntington.  It also afforded me the first opportunity to test the camera protective bag I blogged about a few weeks ago.  The protective bag worked very well in the wet snow conditions.  I used the 24-105 zoom lens and had just a bit of difficulty retracting the zoom all the way to the 24mm zoom position and had to realign the sleave of the protective bag.  It was a bit frustration at the short end of the zoom, but other than that the bag really performed well and kept the camera perfectly dry.  All images were captured hand-held at ISO 400 with the bag in place the entire time.  All images were optimized in Adobe Light Room 2.5 with only minor clone tools used in PS4.  Enjoy the gallery and please let me know if you have any questions. 

A Winter Day in Ritter Park

Firmware and software updates: Canon and Adobe

Canon has released a new firmware update for the Canon 5DMKII.  Most interesting to astrophotographers is that there is a noise reduction update for successive bulb exposures.  I haven't had a chance to check this out, but it is definitely an update astrophotographers should get.

Canon 5DMKII firmware update link.

Adobe has updated Light Room to version 2.6 and Camera Raw 5.6 here.  The Light Room is a free update to current 2.x customers.  Enjoy. 

A great night for shooting stars...

How does your weather forecast look for the night of Sunday December 13? If you have clear skies and moderate temperatures, it will be a great night to get out under the stars and take in the Geminid meteor shower. The predictions are for a very nice event with peak meteors around midnight EST. Darks skies could yield as many as 120 meteors per hour. It is a great event to practice some astronomical photography as well. One technique involves a motorized mount tracking the stars. Simply use a wide angle lens and open your shutter for 30 seconds or longer with the camera pointed to Gemini. You should capture the meteors originating from near the constellation and you can blend all of the images together at the end of the night for a presentation of how many meteors were present over an extended period of time. You can also simply point your camera in the direction of Gemini on a fixed tripod and expose as long as necessary until you capture that bright fireball! Enjoy the event and keep us updated if you get out. Unfortunately, our weather forecast isn't looking too good for Huntington, WV.

For more information please see Sky and Telescopes page on the shower.

San Juan River Gallery...almost there...

I just posted the San Juan River gallery on the website.  I love the way the gallery is presented via squarespace's interface.  The one thing I can't quite get to work is a simultaneous playing of an audio file while viewing the images.  So the next best thing I can do is to provide a link to the music and simply play it in a separate window while you peruse the images.  Here is the link to "Everlasting Light" and please enjoy the show.  Don't forget to activate the "lightroom" mode by clicking on the first image in the gallery and then following the arrow prompts to progress through the show.  Take care.