Ryan's Blog » Astrophotography

Auroras, Stars, and Meteors, oh my!

Ryan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:49:16 +0000

It was an amazing evening here in Alaska. I was outside, setting up another star shot, and taking some test shots (making sure the horizon was straight, the focus was good, etc.) at a high ISO. I noticed a green glow in the test shots, and as I watched the horizon, an aurora blossomed! We’re also in the midst of the Quadrantid meteor shower, so small meteors were flashing all over the sky. It was amazing! I managed to get a few pictures, of course, so here they are.

These first couple are all at ISO 800 for about 15 seconds.

Then, I switched to ISO 200, and locked the shutter open for 10 minutes.

And then again for 20 minutes. I like!

By the time the 20 minute exposure was finished, the aurora had pretty much dissipated, though there is a good chance there will be more tonight. I think I’m going to go to bed, though, since it’s after 2am here, and we have to work tomorrow.

One more after waking up

Ryan — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:38:51 +0000

Well, why not? It’s still pretty dark for another hour after I wake up and take out the dogs!

I managed to catch Polaris with this one, though just barely.

One shot before bed

Ryan — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 08:55:48 +0000

It was so clear and cold tonight, I had to get in one shot of the horizon before going to sleep. I can almost get Polaris in with the trees, at 17mm. Anyone want to spring for the 10.5mm fisheye for me?? :-D

Tomorrow I’m going to start using my Flickr account more, so that picture over on the right should change almost daily.

Taking a long look at the sky

Ryan — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 07:39:02 +0000

Guess what these are:

If you guessed “stars,” then give yourself a pat on the back! I took my 500mm lens, focused it to infinity, aimed it at a bright star, and locked down my remote shutter release for about 9 minutes. The bright trail near the center is the one I aimed for, but there are a lot of fainter stars around it that I didn’t see with my eyes. The variety of colors the camera picked up is also interesting, since most stars look white from here.

Sadly, I learned my camera isn’t the best for long exposures in the dark. DSLRs, and Nikons especially, apparently have a problem with their internal electronics heating up during long exposures and causing blobs of noise to appear in the image. You can see what it looks like here. I’ve cropped the offending bits out of the picture above, but it reduces my usable frame area by about 30%. Basically, my trusty D80 isn’t so great for astrophotography.

Which means on top of the equatorial mount, I’d probably need to get some sort of cooled CCD system to take really awesome deep space shots. Oh yeah, and I’d need a good telescope.

I think I’ll stick to star trails for now.