01.01.13

here are two pictures i took on the 29th of december. happy new year, by the way!

canon 60D / iso 125 / f/5 / 1/100sec.

canon 60D / iso 1250 / f/5.6 / 1/13sec.

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mixed goodie bag from the past couple of weeks.

here are a bunch of photos i've taken over the last month and a half. i haven't gotten around to uploading these here because to be pretty honest i'm not all that familiar with the summer night sky.  i feel like the biggest sky noob even talking about it, so let's just get to the pics.

great nebula in orion (M42). this time in colour, yay!

canon 60D / iso 5000 / f/5.6 / 4sec @ 250mm (first image) / 3.2sec @ 300mm (second image)

you may have to fullsize this image to appreciate its content, but that's jupiter and the four galilean moons io, callisto, ganymede, and europa. callisto is the dimmest of the four, but i'm not sure how to ID the others :P here's an image from wikipedia to help place them:

none of the above were taken using a telescope! couldn't finish without something taken through the dobsonian though, so here's a happy jupiter. i couldn't expose it enough to get the moons in there too, or i'd lose all the banding detail on the planet. nonetheless, enjoy!

jupity mcjupe jupe joopin' around in space.

canon 60D / iso 800 / f/5.6 / 1/20sec.

no penumbral lunar eclipse photo this time around because to be honest, it sucked.

that's all for now :)

a total solar eclipse!

or 95% total, for you see we were supposed to go and watch the total eclipse in cairns but my university decided to stick my exam right on eclipse day. :( so unfortunately no sweet diamond ring or totality images, just a smiling sun. luna and sol, playing hide and seek. let's take a look.

canon 60D / iso 200 / f/5.6 / 1/125sec

23.09.2012 : the large magellanic cloud

pentax k-5 / iso 1600 / f/1.4 / 50mm / 45sec

so. dylan and i went deep sky object hunting the other night, found a few notables.. most impressive (to me) was just how much detail in andromeda we could gather from the light information naked-eye (binoculars), and dylan's photos of the LMC & SMC. these parts of the sky are foreign to me, as i started this hobby back in january when the sky looked very different. i had seen the magellanic clouds before, but had never thought to photograph them. that will definitely have to change after having seen them in last night's conditions.

for more info about this awesome irregular galaxy, zoom over to wikipedia.

this image is dylan's, i played with it in lightroom a bit. you can view the original here.

stay tuned! lots more photos to come from subsequent trips, we're gonna make this a regular thing. the sky is just too gorgeous 30 minutes out of town not to keep at it.

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Orion's Up!

The famous Orion Nebula (Messier 42).

Ignore the dark noise, I didn't stack it with any dark frames.

The Orion Nebula (aka M42).

I had a heap of other ones that were a little more zoomed in, but they were all out of focus - so I had to crop a wider angled shot and a lot of detail of the nebula itself was lost because of that.

29.08.2012

so this is dylan's composite image of roughly seven different exposures of about 1 minute each, taken a couple of weeks ago. i played around with it in lightroom but i don't think he was too impressed with the results. i'm uploading them anyway, because i spent time on it, and because i can.

canon 60d / iso 800 / f/1.8 / 1.6sec

guess who stayed up all night to check orion out in the dawn? this yves right here. turns out darkness doesn't really help the nebula stand out to the naked eye at all. i have no idea how i'm ever going to get a proper photograph of you, M42. i have an unfriendly suspicion that it'll cost me a great deal of money to achieve this goal.

08.08.2012

full moon, august 2nd

canon 60d / iso 100 / f/4.5 / 1/160sec

many different objects in this widefield taken at 50mm, notably messier 7, the butterfly cluster (M6), the lagoon and trifid nebulas (M8 & 20) and if you look closely, M23 is faintly visible in the bottom right as a smudge.

canon 60d / iso 500 / f/1.8 / 5sec

my first attempt at M4, the small smudge left of centre between antares (big red giant) and al niyat, or sigma scorpii, the lower of the two bright stars near the heart of scorpius.

canon 60d / iso 1000 / f/1.8 / 3.2sec