Few show for spectacular view

The Moon: Mare Serenitatis (left, Sea of Serenity), half-lit Mare Iridium (right, Sea of Rainbows) 

I can't say as I blame them, the people who didn't show for our observatory open night Saturday. After all, the temperature was about 19 degrees (F), damned cold! But the sky was clear and the waxing Moon was high in the sky. Both Moon and Jupiter were sharing constellation Cancer with The Beehive star cluster (M44). Still, those sensible people who stayed home and warm missed a glorious view of old Luna. In my idle time waiting for visitors, I tried out a little afocal astrophotography using the observatory's 9-inch Warner and Swasey telescope (ca. 1901) and my little Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 all-in-one. Most shots were a little shy of sharp, and all had some degree of chromatic aberration, and all had a big chunk of image missing where our century-old star diagonal is missing a bit of glass. One shot, however, did work out well, especially after a little fix-up including conversion to monochrome to eliminate color fringing. Not long after our seven brave visitors left, I caught sight of the indistinct reappearance of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and that was it... time to close up and go home. My toes needed to be thawed.

Fun without a telescope

Jupiter with Moons (lower left), Beehive Cluster (upper right) in Cancer
Canon EOS 7D Mark II: ISO 2000, f/4, 2 seconds, 135mm

My experiments in astrophotography sans telescope continued tonight with some success and exciting promise! Since, given clear skies Saturday night, we'll be observing Jupiter and the Beehive Cluster (M44), I gave them a try. In our light-polluted skies Jupiter was easy to find tonight in constellation Cancer but the Beehive was invisible. With the camera and a 200mm zoom telephoto mounted only on a tripod (no tracking) I tried my first exposure of the night. Bingo! There was brilliant Jove at the bottom of the frame and, on the other edge of the image in the camera's LCD panel, was that pretty open star cluster! I re-composed the shot, leaving open space where I guessed the star cluster lay, and shot bracketed exposures. Then I swapped lenses installing the 400mm telephoto on the camera body.

Jupiter is overexposed but shows Galilean Moons: Callisto, Europa, Io, and on right, Ganymede
Canon EOS 7D Mark II: ISO 2000, f/5.6, 1.6 seconds, 400mm*

I centered Jupiter in the viewfinder and bracketed exposures later seeing that I should have allowed even more than I did for Jupiter's exceptional brightness. Before tearing down for the night -- this was a very brief session conducted from the balcony of our house -- I swung the camera around and tried some exposures of the Orion Nebula (M42).

Orion Nebula is blurred (no tracking) but shows color and the nebula's cloud structure emerging from the dark.
Canon EOS 7D Mark II: ISO 2000, f/5.6, 2 seconds, 400mm*

Examining the images on the computer screen a few minutes later, I was pretty happy. And even though it shows motion blur due to the longer exposure, the Orion Nebula was showing color! Next I need to obtain a dovetail bracket so that I can mount the camera with telephoto directly on my computerized telescope mount; this summer, the camera will piggyback on the telescope and I'll expect exciting results either way. Still, I enjoy the quick, elegant setup of camera on photo tripod and I'm discovering good images are to be had from that.

* Note: The Canon 7D is a cropped-sensor camera with a multiplication factor of 1.6, so a 400mm lens reaches the equivalent focal length of 640mm. 

Moon, Venus, and City Lights

At conjunction: Moon and Venus floating over city lights and in light pollution.

I was disappointed with my previous efforts at recording an earlier close passage of our Moon and Venus (Moon, Mars, and Venus had been “dancing” in our evening skies over the past month.). The Moon’s orbit, however, gave me a second chance on a night when the sky was pretty clear. Pretty cold, too, at an unseasonable 23F (March 22).

Crescent Moon, Earthlight, and Stars

Nonetheless, I braved the temperatures and, using two different Canon camera bodies, got shots of the combo first in twilight, later in a dark sky. Well, the sky here isn’t really all that dark, but it was pretty good. Some shots I exposed to get some detail in the lighted portion of the thin, waxing crescent Moon; others I exposed to record the Earthshine portion of Luna’s disk. A short telephoto gave me a nice nighttime landscape, whereas a long telephoto (400mm) won a good image of crescent Luna with an Earthlit shadowed disk and stars floating in the sky nearby. The late shots I took from a vantage point that overlooked the lights of a nearby city whose glow put power lines and their towers into silhouette.

All-in-all, I’m pleased with the night’s efforts; it was worth the stinging redness in my fingers and my cold, cold toes getting those images.