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.

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.

Beginning the year with Comet C2014 Q2 (Lovejoy)

In January the big deal in astronomy, at least for amateurs, has been seeing and imaging Comet Lovejoy -- technically: C2014 Q2 (Lovejoy). The comet was a (barely) naked-eye object under the clearest skies but its appearance was glorious in the best images made of it. In the best images a long, smoke-like tail streamed off a globular head or nucleus against a beautiful field of stars. The most distinctive feature of this visitor to the inner solar system, however, was its green appearance, seen in even the crudest of photographic images -- mine included!

Weather has been largely uncooperative for comet-watching from Northeastern Ohio with most nights in January being impossibly cloudy. On the rare clear night, temperatures were usually in the frigid teens; enough to scare off all but the bravest, most hardy observers and imagers. On one cold night I noticed the sky was clear of most clouds; bands of cloud were drifting across from north to south. It looked like I might have a limited opportunity for photography. I quickly set up my camera, 400mm lens and tripod and tried some imaging hoping that, without tracking, I could pull something from my efforts.

Comet Lovejoy is the lovely green "fuzzball" located left of the center of this photo. Canon EOS 50D: ISO 1250, f/5.6, 6 sec., 400mm (600mm equiv.), January 16, 2015 @ 11:02 PM EDT. Photo by James Guilford.

Comet Lovejoy was easy to find with binoculars located, as it was that night, directly "down" from The Pleiades star cluster in the western sky. I could even make out the comet's faint smudge in the viewfinder of my single-lens reflex camera; the comet was at or near its brightest for this apparition! After perhaps a dozen shots at different shutter speeds and refocusing a time or two, I fled indoors and stowed my gear to let it warm to room temperature. Looking at the tiny images in the camera's internal LCD panel, I was hopeful. I was disappointed later when, reviewing the images on the computer's mammoth screen, I could see star trails that would cause me fits.

The image shown above resulted after a lot of effort, seeking the best way to remove star trails from the image. In the telephoto view, the stars "moved" significantly in the six seconds of the exposure. Using Photoshop, I masked out most of the trails and, in so doing, lost much of the image brightness and many dimmer stars. I immediately wished I'd have taken the time and frostbite risk and set up, at the very least, one of my telescopes' mounts with tracking capability.

Simulated view of C2014 Q2 and star field showing it amongst stars at the edge of constellation Aries as they appeared at the time the photographic image was made. All are "minor" stars without common names. Sky Safari +

So, I learned (and re-learned) a couple of things that I hope to remember and act upon:

• Longer focal length magnifies the apparent motion - don't get greedy, a 200mm lens would have made a better photo in this case; I could have included The Pleiades!
• Set up the telescope tracking drive if there's any opportunity to do so! A good alternative (that I intend to pursue) is a simplified "star tracking" device intended for cameras; I'm considering three available devices that are faster to set up than telescope mounts.

C2014 Q2 won't return for about 8,000 years so, while I'm sad I didn't get better photos of my own of that lovely visitor; I'm happy to have seen it with my own eyes!