Sunday: 19 November 2006
Well that was a bust. The Radiant did not Radiate. I think Robin probably saw more Leonids than I did! I did see a couple of nice ones but they were never in the field of view of the camera.
I started playing around with the camera around 10pm, with temps dropping into the low 30s (F) by 3am, when I decided to hang it up. Not all was a bust though, I did work with camera settings for sky photography, and was pleased with the results. That is *after* I realized after 2 hours and 50 photographs that I had set the camera to the highest f/stop rather than the lowest. Dumb, dumber, dumbest!
Eventually, once I realized this rather basic and significant mistake, I was generally using these settings for the photographs below, and I might modify them somewhat still.
Robin, these settings are probably not useful for something as bright as the moon! You’d get a huge white square with no definition. The tripod is a great idea. Cut down the exposure time, don’t worry overly about the f-stop settings or the ISO setting.
ISO: 800 (background noise was evident at 30s exposures, correctible by image processing.)
Exposure: uniformly 30s, with Noise Reduction “on”. I might try reducing this to 15s for “closeups”.
Aperture: eventually fully open. f/3.8.
Focus: infinity, of course.
Field of view: as large as possible, but I did a few “closeups” with the telephoto, and that’s where I might reduce the exposure time. The streaking of stars due to earth rotation is evident at 30s.
Lighting: I chose auto, but there might be a better setting. The options don’t include starfields: “cloudy”? “shade”? maybe “incandescent”! Certainly not “flash”! Don’t use flash!
Photo format: I used the usual setting, Fine/Jpg, but I think I’ll try Raw next time.
Image processing: DO NOT save star photos as jpgs. Maybe there’s a way to do it without losing color, but once I’d closed out the PaintShopPro program and restarted it all processed images had lost all the great colors. Save images as *png* files. I have a feeling I have more to learn about this, but I do know that jpgs compress files with loss of information everytime you save, and pngs do not. Png format is not something you’d want to save a complex photo with, but for simple line drawings and things like this, it’s perfect and makes tiny little files.
Here’s a SkyMapPro screen capture of the Eastern Skies about 3am. The white square is what the camera saw at full field of view, and the green square is a blowup of the region containing the Beehive Nebula, M44.
Let’s look at the white square, the full field of view that was photographed. Our hopes were dashed, of course, that there would be a meteor within.
Saturn is in Leo right now, but it’s the Beehive, M44, that I’m interested in, so let’s blow up the map of Cancer, which contains that open cluster:
I’ve labelled the brighter stars with Bayer numbers so that the photograph below corresponds. The Beehive, labelled M44 above and below, is not the brightest of objects. It is visible unaided but only as a fuzz. This is one that I could probably do better on - the streaking is clear here.
Let’s look toward the north, and again here’s a SkyMapPro capture that encompasses the entire view that you’d see from the horizon up, at 3am last night. The green square encompasses an interesting region that includes some of the richest starfields in the sky - Perseus and Cassiopeia:
Here’s the SkyMapPro image of the region in that green square, which corresponds to the photograph below this image:
Here’s the corresponding photograph. I labelled the brighter stars again, this time with proper names, above and below. The region labelled Double Cluster is two large open clusters that, like the Beehive, are rather faint but large and located between Perseus and Cassiopeia.
So I was pleased with the results. The blue and red colors come through well, but the yellows show up as white. All in all, this seems to image stars down to mag7, which is about 2 orders dimmer than what most people can visualize with their eyes, and equivalent to a very good set of binoculars. The binoculars won’t give you these colors, though, which are not enhanced here, they are what the camera has seen.
I started playing around with the camera around 10pm, with temps dropping into the low 30s (F) by 3am, when I decided to hang it up. Not all was a bust though, I did work with camera settings for sky photography, and was pleased with the results. That is *after* I realized after 2 hours and 50 photographs that I had set the camera to the highest f/stop rather than the lowest. Dumb, dumber, dumbest!
Eventually, once I realized this rather basic and significant mistake, I was generally using these settings for the photographs below, and I might modify them somewhat still.
Robin, these settings are probably not useful for something as bright as the moon! You’d get a huge white square with no definition. The tripod is a great idea. Cut down the exposure time, don’t worry overly about the f-stop settings or the ISO setting.
ISO: 800 (background noise was evident at 30s exposures, correctible by image processing.)
Exposure: uniformly 30s, with Noise Reduction “on”. I might try reducing this to 15s for “closeups”.
Aperture: eventually fully open. f/3.8.
Focus: infinity, of course.
Field of view: as large as possible, but I did a few “closeups” with the telephoto, and that’s where I might reduce the exposure time. The streaking of stars due to earth rotation is evident at 30s.
Lighting: I chose auto, but there might be a better setting. The options don’t include starfields: “cloudy”? “shade”? maybe “incandescent”! Certainly not “flash”! Don’t use flash!
Photo format: I used the usual setting, Fine/Jpg, but I think I’ll try Raw next time.
Image processing: DO NOT save star photos as jpgs. Maybe there’s a way to do it without losing color, but once I’d closed out the PaintShopPro program and restarted it all processed images had lost all the great colors. Save images as *png* files. I have a feeling I have more to learn about this, but I do know that jpgs compress files with loss of information everytime you save, and pngs do not. Png format is not something you’d want to save a complex photo with, but for simple line drawings and things like this, it’s perfect and makes tiny little files.
Here’s a SkyMapPro screen capture of the Eastern Skies about 3am. The white square is what the camera saw at full field of view, and the green square is a blowup of the region containing the Beehive Nebula, M44.
Let’s look at the white square, the full field of view that was photographed. Our hopes were dashed, of course, that there would be a meteor within.
Saturn is in Leo right now, but it’s the Beehive, M44, that I’m interested in, so let’s blow up the map of Cancer, which contains that open cluster:
I’ve labelled the brighter stars with Bayer numbers so that the photograph below corresponds. The Beehive, labelled M44 above and below, is not the brightest of objects. It is visible unaided but only as a fuzz. This is one that I could probably do better on - the streaking is clear here.
Let’s look toward the north, and again here’s a SkyMapPro capture that encompasses the entire view that you’d see from the horizon up, at 3am last night. The green square encompasses an interesting region that includes some of the richest starfields in the sky - Perseus and Cassiopeia:
Here’s the SkyMapPro image of the region in that green square, which corresponds to the photograph below this image:
Here’s the corresponding photograph. I labelled the brighter stars again, this time with proper names, above and below. The region labelled Double Cluster is two large open clusters that, like the Beehive, are rather faint but large and located between Perseus and Cassiopeia.
So I was pleased with the results. The blue and red colors come through well, but the yellows show up as white. All in all, this seems to image stars down to mag7, which is about 2 orders dimmer than what most people can visualize with their eyes, and equivalent to a very good set of binoculars. The binoculars won’t give you these colors, though, which are not enhanced here, they are what the camera has seen.
