moon


Last Days

This “young” crescent Moon was captured on 1/26 from the parking lot of our condo.  At that time it was thin enough and set early enough that it had no impact on astrophotography, but in a few days it will become annoyingly bright and late.  Accordingly, we’ll be returning home soon, although I am not looking forward to the gloomy weather that will plague the Portland area for months to come. I have captured some other targets that aren’t yet processed, and probably won’t be until after we get back home. It was a great trip.  Aside from some very […]


Moonrise Over Font’s Point

Yesterday’s Full Moon seriously limited the amount of deep-space imaging I’ve been able to do lately, but also provided a great opportunity for some “terrestrial” photography.  My friend, Mike, had calculated where we needed to be to place the rising moon just over Font’s Point, a popular local attraction.  I wasn’t really prepared for this in that I didn’t have a long focal length lens and hadn’t worked out how to bracket the exposures to capture both the dimly lit foreground and the very bright moon.  This was captured with a 200mm lens on a Nikon D300 camera.  I could […]


Another Wild Flower from OSP

It seems that every year when I go to OSP (Oregon Star Party) I end up shooting this beauty, the Iris Nebula, and each year it gets a little better.  I had not planned to shoot it again this year, but when I saw how good the seeing was on the second night, I just had to drop what I was doing and move on to the Iris. The Iris (NGC7023) is a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus, which has many great targets for astrophotography.  As with the Pleiades cluster, the blue appearance is really just the color of […]


Welcome to Summer!

Today (June 21st) is the Summer solstice, so it is now officially Summer.  And the longest day/shortest night of the year. I think that amateur astronomers have mixed feelings about Summer.  It’s annoying that the night is so short (tonight, even without the Moon, it would be truly dark for only a few hours), and you have to stay up pretty late before it starts.  On the other hand, you can stay up through all of it and still get to bed long before it’s time for breakfast.  And usually, you can stay up all night without freezing. I must […]


Where’s My Lunar Eclipse?

  There will be a Total Lunar Eclipse this coming Sunday night, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the weather will cooperate and give us a good view of the dark, red Moon.  For people in the Portland, OR area there is probably not much hope, as the forecast (unsurprisingly) calls for heavy cloud cover all week.  That’s why we’re down here in southern California!  The forecast here, however, is quite annoying, calling for fairly clear skies for at least 2 days either side of it, but not so good at the actual time of the eclipse! On the […]


You Don’t Always Get What You Want

We had some clear skies here for a few days, and although I’ve been too busy to stay up all night for deep-space object (DSO) photography, I had been waiting for the opportunity to try planetary imaging with the ASI174 camera I got a few months ago, and there was a transit of Io across Jupiter happening that night.  I didn’t get it. Here’s what happened:  The picture above was taken well before the transit started (I think the dim spot just to the left of Jupiter is Io) with the camera attached directly to my 8″ EdgeHD telescope.  This […]


Lunar Eclipse

On December 10, 2011 we had a total Lunar eclipse starting at about 4AM. A lunar eclipse is when Earth comes directly between the Sun and the Moon, so the Moon is in our shadow. Although it is much dimmer than the Moon is normally, it is still easily visible, being illuminated by light coming around Earth. The orange color is due to the refraction of light through Earth’s atmosphere. This is the same effect that makes the sky appear blue to us here on Earth.  Scope: AT111EDT at f/5.6 Mount: AP Mach1GTO Camera: QSI 583 Exposure: LRGB (single frame, […]