Keyword: sky

"Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter." --Ansel Adams I don't believe in coincidence. That beauty and timing like this is to me a sign of God's love in the world. As only He can do. Whenever I try to do two things at the same time, they both fall short of their full potential. Things line up for a reason, with God there is no coincidence. I mean, I was walking my dog when I made this picture. But I had to stop walking and make the d…

In this day and age of technology you’ll never miss a picture of a rainbow. Digital cameras changed photography, and now smart phones are changing digital cameras. Yet, not too long ago my camera of choice was a Pentax and not an iPhone. But now the iPhone camera is becoming competitive, if not superior, to the DSLR or especially the Point and Shoot camera. I tried using Android phone cameras, and in my tests there is much more attention going into the iPhone camera by Apple than by Sams…

Plate-solving is useful -- especially when you use it to correct a telescope's position in real-time . You also can feed the solver an existing photo and manually read the results but using the output can be cumbersome. Manual copy & paste coordinates of input fields of tools like Stellarium helps, but that approach isn't very user friendly. Here's a different take on this -- solve the image and instantly get the sky map of that region. Again, this is using mostly freeeware tools.

The Moon not only is a stepping stone for humankind's exploration of the universe. The Moon also is a good stepping stone for your astrophotography and often the first distant target people shoot.

A standardized image format is something most users take for granted -- JPG, GIF, PNG and even TIFF are household names when it comes to (web)-images & editing. If you use a dSLR, you have gotten used to adding a tool or two, to process the Nikon or Canon RAW formats. With the astronomy cameras, the formats & necessary conversions become a real mess -- especially if you use a one-shot color "OSC" camera.

For this article, I use the eclipse on April 15th 2014 as an example and as a location I have picked San Francisco. The path of the moon & the timing is dependent on your own location and you will have to make adjustments for that. Here are some examples and a bit of background of the various attempts : www.ipernity.com/doc/stargazer95050/album/389379

PLANNING is in my opinion one of the best ingredients to any successful venture, astrophotography & otherwise. And in another article, I wrote about the WHERE / LOCATION. The right timing of WHEN also is important If I have to explain to you WHY stargazing is great, you're at the wrong page SCOUTING WHERE to shoot is one important step : /stargazer95050/657919 DECIDING WHAT objects to photograph : /stargazer95050/704191 PLANNING WHEN to shoot is another : /stargazer95050/659063 DECIDING WHAT equipment suits the task best : PRACTICE HOW to shoot is just as important : /stargazer95050/657921 POST-PROCESSING of the captured results :

Supernovae are among the most powerful events in our universe and they emit unimaginable amounts of energy. And long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away that has happened but it took 11.5 million years and only now does this energy reach us, some of it visible to our eyes. Look up at the sky & search for the M82 "Cigar Galaxy" -- it will be over in a few weeks.

The tools like Vixen POLARIE, iOptron SKYTRACKER and the ASTROTRAC all have their use and fans. And they are capable to move a small camera setup and effectively eliminate startrails. They are small and comparatively easy to use but are quite expensive for what they can do. They also have limitations and here I want to point to the benefits of a real EQ mount. Some of these mounts cost about as much as any of these devices once you add up all the costs for the additional accessories.

As a matter of fact the optimist is quite optimistic. Nearly always he sees the good part of things. A thunderstorm e.g. is fantastic and interesting rather than irritating or frightening. Getting wet to the core because of bad timing of a bycicle tour (through the rain), makes him laugh rather than shouting curses to the wheathergod. The solution of friends problems is just a matter of different approach and really difficult ones just need some talk to friends, a handful of good will and time t…