Moonshot experiments continue

The Waxing Gibbous Moon - April 24, 2015

The sky was beautiful tonight with the Moon, planets, and stars shining brightly. Continuing my experiments with telephoto astrophotography, tonight I attached my Canon 2X III Adapter to my 400mm lens, and EOS 7D Mark II body; the combination gives approximately 1,200mm of telephoto goodness! At that focal length camera vibration becomes a real issue if the system isn't attached to a very heavy tripod. My tripod isn't heavy. But the Moon was bright and with ISO 800 and a shutter speed of 1/400 I got decent, though not vividly sharp results. Next milestone will be to mount the camera and telephoto to the telescope's heavy tripod and motorized mount.

That's no meteor!

International Space Station Rising from Perseus

That’s no meteor! It’s a partial trace of the trail the International Space Station (ISS) took tonight as it traveled upward, through constellation Perseus, and faded into Earth’s shadow. The exposure, and thus the trace, was shortened to avoid overexposure due to heavy light pollution in the Cleveland (Ohio) area. This is my best ISS trail shot to-date; getting these photos is much more difficult than it seems ... the difficulty coming from the aforementioned city-caused sky glow! Photo Info: Canon EOS 6D: ISO 400, f/4, 17 sec., 58mm.

Venus and the stars in the west

Hyades - Venus - Pleiades

April 11 presented a rare clear night just in time to see Venus draw very close to the Pleiades star cluster; nights lately have been cloudy and wet! Timing also put the Hyades cluster within the same camera field-of-view as Venus nightly progresses higher in the sky, relative to the stars. As the grouping sank into the trees to my west, I made several single-exposure images of the sight. Photo Info: Canon EOS 7D Mark II: ISO 2000, f/5.6, 1.6 sec., 70mm, at 9:58 EDT.