California Gallery
In October I had an opportunity to visit some of my favorite locations in and around southeast California and a few new ones as well. You can check out my video linked in the blog that takes you on the journey with me. Here are some of the images from the trip. The Sony A7RIII and Venus Laowa 15mm f2 and Sony f4 24-105mm G lenses are fantastic. I use the Venus 15mm mostly for astroscapes. The f2 and 15mm really deliver. The edges aren’t perfect, but stars are a very difficult test for lenses. I hope you enjoy the images and drop me a note.
Badwater Twilight
Badwater Milky Way.
High Dynamic Range demonstrated with a blend from the Sony A7RIII. Sand Dunes near Stovepipe Wells.
Trona Pinnacles and Milky Way
Rhyolite Bank and Milky Way
Dante’s Twilight
California Nebula in Perseus (NGC 1499)
I just love my ultimate portable astrophoto setup. It was clear on Thursday evening and it took just a few minutes to setup in the driveway to capture the California nebula. This nebula lies 1,500 light years away and stretches for over 100 light years in length. Still looking for the West Virginia nebula.
For acquisition detailed images please see my astrobin page.
Please click on image for larger presentation.
Clear skies!
California Photography Trip
Hello and welcome to the blog. Last October my company had a meeting in Las Vegas. Ian of Lonely Speck announced a meet up at Trona Pinnacle the weekend before my trip! Amazing timing and so photographic planning was under way for an early arrival into Vegas and visiting one of my favorite locations: Death Valley. This video presents highlights from the trip. Check it out if you have a few minutes and don’t miss photographing anywhere in California if given the opportunity.
Veil Nebula Mosaic from Spruce Knob, WV
There are so many great things about astrophotography, one of which is the never ending learning curve when it comes to processing image data. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to process the 3 panel mosaic I captured over two nights at Spruce Knob summit. It had been a long time since I did 3 panels and I was learning a new processing program as well. So, I dove in and things came together much quicker than I expected. I am really finalizing my workflow from Pixinsight to Photoshop and may someday make a small presentation on that. But, in the meantime, this is one of my favorite areas of the sky.
The Veil Nebula Supernova remnant is also known as the Cygnus loop. Link to Wikipedia. To think this is the expanding remnant from a star 20 times bigger than our sun and happened over 8,000 years ago is stunning.
The complex covers a little wider part of the sky than this composition, but this was the best I could cover in two pristine nights on Spruce with my current gear.
For a complete technical list for this image, please see my astrobin page.
I hope you enjoy the image and can marvel at what it represents. Have a great day.
Click on image for larger presentation.
New Images from Spruce Knob and a Revisit
Hello friends and imagers.
My new image processing workflow is starting to yield results. I have processed and published much of the work captured from the summit of Spruce Knob in September. I still have some mosaic work to be done and many more sets of data to work up.
But for now, here are the images from Spruce Knob. You can click on each image for a larger presentation.
These are old standards of the night sky, but I wanted to capture data with the new equipment. The AP Stowaway and ZWO ASI 294 MC Pro did the lions share of the work. I did add some halpha data to the Andromeda Galaxy that was acquired right from my backyard.
The Great Andromeda Galaxy. Spruce Knob RGB data supplemented with Halpha from home.
Approximately 3 hours of data acquired from the summit of Spruce Knob for M45 The Pleiades Star Cluster.
M16 or Eagle Nebula is hard for me to access. It is behind the hill at my house, so I always have to travel to image this area. I did not get as much data as I wanted on this object as clouds rolled in. I hope to revisit in 2020.
I revisited some DSLR data taken a couple of years ago on the Astro-Physics 130 Gran Turismo with some recently acquired Halpha data on the Astro-Physics Stowaway.
Jeff's Blog
Join me on photography journeys from desert landscapes to deep sky wonders.