Transits and occultations involving the planets are always fun to photograph since they reveal a sense of scale.
(2004 transit of Venus) (2012 transit of Venus. The first picture with my own camera which doesn't have mirror lockup. For the second I borrowed a camera body with mirror lockup - much sharper)
A bunch of ice halos:
(Including some instruments of my weather station)
(Some of the challenges of keeping a weather station operational. That's not fluffy frost, but pretty solid, up to 10cm thick, ice building up towards the wind when it's foggy. Bad for anemometers.)
Iridium flash: (photographed with 200mm through a layer of thin clouds)
Are these long exposure or is your view of the stars just that awesome (I see 10-12 a night, so seeing more can cause me to have aneurisms and strokes).
The shots are taken with about 27 second exposure and a fairly large ISO. The shot right above the panorama is pretty close to what the sky looks to the naked eye.
If you spend enough time looking at the sky, so that your eyes get adjusted to the dark and the sky is clear enough, you start to notice that the sky is not actually dark at all, but a mass of stars. It is really an eye opening experiance.
I occasionally get requests about permission to use that Iridium picture in teaching materials. Most recently it was featured in a 12 lecture DVD series by Alex Filippenko. It's Iridium 19, photographed in 1998, btw.
Added (23.04.2013, 11:04) --------------------------------------------- Satellite flares are very common in Norway (and often mistaken for meteors), since many satellites have polar orbits making the sky pretty crowded here. I posted an animation a while ago showing flares in roughly the same spot on subsequent nights. Here's a new extended version showing the same over a period of more than two weeks (cloudy nights excluded): There is one picture per night and all are taken at roughly the same time (±15 minutes, check Jupiter to the right). Some nights have three flares in the same area and all these occur a few minutes apart.
I don't know what satellites these are (I couldn't find any matching Iridiums). It's perhaps not surprising that there are several flares in the same area of the sky, if the satellites have roughly the same orientation relative to the Earth and the sun.
59.97048N 10.64917E 346 masl. Period: 27th March till 10th April. Looking WNW. Around 22:30 UTC, drifting slightly from before this time to after this time as the days went by, if I recall correctly.
I'm pretty sure those are Iridium afterall. Here's an animation for some passes around 22:30 from March 27 through April 1. Some of those flares were really bright, down to -7 magnitude!
Typical values for the passes (at least for those among the first six nights) Times: 22:30 UTC, plus or minus 10 minutes. Azimuth: 250 to 260 degrees Elevation: 20 to 15 degrees
Yes, that looks like perfect matches, and it went on like that well into April. I've been using the Heavens Above website, and either I recall incorrectly or the site failed to hindcast accurately.
The frequency of -7 and brighter Iridiums increases rapidly further north. In northern Norway, 70N, expect to see a couple of them a day. When you approach 80N or as far as civilisation goes, there are several every day, sometimes as many as around 10. You see them all the time up there and they've become a feature of the night sky. And if you look towards a certain region of the northern sky, you will almost always spot one or two faint satellites within a few seconds.
Wow, all your pictures of the night sky are just awesome! I can't wait until I get my Canon 1000d camera and start taking photographs myself! Unfortunately for me (and us, I see many of you are from the Nordic countries!), living at 60th latitude north, the bright summer nights have already come.
This is a picture of the moon that I took about a year ago. Through a small telescope without any other equipment with my phone camera! Not as good as yours, but maybe someone likes it.
Love Space Engine!
Edited by Fireinthehole - Monday, 29.04.2013, 18:57
Ok, after a long astrophotography drought on my part here's a neat new image from pictures I took last night (also the first time I've ever imaged these objects!)
It's Saturn! This image of the Saturn system was a 1-second exposure using ISO 12800 (the image of Saturn itself is of course a separate exposure; 1/20 sec and ISO 100). As a very pleasant surprise, Iapetus was (barely) visible! Rhea was visible too, though almost lost in Saturn's glare. Tethys would have been visible as well but was completely consumed by the glare from Saturn. Titan, of course, was plainly visible too, with its orange color clearly evident.
Below is an annotated version, with objects labeled.
The numbers in parentheses are the apparent magnitudes of the objects, not counting for atmospheric extinction. Stars for which I have no name information are noted only by their magnitudes. Any object not labeled is either image noise or is possibly a star that I can't confirm exists.
Now I have only one planet (Neptune) and one major moon (Triton) left to photograph. Neptune should be an easy target, but Triton will be impossible unless I use some sort of tracking mount.
All forum users, please read this! My SE mods and addons Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, GTX 970 3584 MB VRAM
Edited by HarbingerDawn - Saturday, 04.05.2013, 23:34
ENG
New site
Norway 
France 
United States 
Finland 
Sweden 
Philippines 
