Tej Dyal
Timelapse: The Shard slices attacking Wolf Moon
For the last three months I have been planning a full moon shoot with my 100 year old canon 650D using my equally ancient f6.3 80" refractor (500mm) but have been defeated by bad weather each time. But this time I had clearest of skies (though some gusts of 25mph) and a nice landmark foreground, The Shard.
This was a hard one to capture because the moonset was in full daylight so the moon was actually almost invisible to the naked eye. I had no idea what shutter speed to shoot at. But you photographers know the power of raw frames taking in so much more information than what the eyes can see and sure enough in processing, there was the moon licking the shard like an ice cream. I might be able to turn this into a timelapse as I have enough frames.
This was a moonset btw, 8:10am-ish in Greenwich. I was accompanied by my fellow Flamsteed Astronomer friend, Helen who is even more a moon chaser than me, and I suspect has some better pictures as usual.
But I had calculated the moonset transit behind the Shard with the help of Google Earth, Stellarium and a little Python program that I wrote to predict the moon placement against landmarks...and I (or rather my program, Google Earth and stellarium) was spot on! I am going to develop that program a bit more to look more presentable and user friendly then put it up on Github as a free open-source program.
Location: Greenwich
Telescope: Skywatcher Equinox 80
Mount: Celestron Nexstar 8SE
Camera: Canon 650D
ISO: 200
Shutter: 1/1000
f6.3
f/l: 504mm
Software: EOS Utilities (capture), Camera Raw, various adjustments to bring out the almost invisible moon. Photoschop for final levels and curves adjustment and clearing dust bunnies on my well battered camera sensor.
Capture method: Used EOS Utilities on a Dell XPS13 Ultrabook tethered to camera to shoot the moonset. the 13inch screen helps me see the images live and, in more comfort, even though it's a cumbersome setup.
Timelapse info: 206 frames, variable speed because I ended up manually snapping away every second as if the world will end if I stopped...and it almost felt like it as gusts were up to 30mph on this deceptively clear sky morning.
Processing the timelapse was challenging as the exposures were dropping up and down due to a chimney bellowing smoke at the moon-shard transit (another indication of the high winds). All fun, though, as I relearn how to do timelapses.
I used Lightroom for sequencing, visual adjustments, dust cleansing and exposure smoothing then photoshop for rendering. Then Da Vinci Resolve for video denoising, lower flickering (by using a cloning track frame shift speed up technique) and lighting effect.
Wolf howling sound from Universfield:
pixabay.com/users/universfield-28281460/
Timelapse: The Shard slices attacking Wolf Moon
For the last three months I have been planning a full moon shoot with my 100 year old canon 650D using my equally ancient f6.3 80" refractor (500mm) but have been defeated by bad weather each time. But this time I had clearest of skies (though some gusts of 25mph) and a nice landmark foreground, The Shard.
This was a hard one to capture because the moonset was in full daylight so the moon was actually almost invisible to the naked eye. I had no idea what shutter speed to shoot at. But you photographers know the power of raw frames taking in so much more information than what the eyes can see and sure enough in processing, there was the moon licking the shard like an ice cream. I might be able to turn this into a timelapse as I have enough frames.
This was a moonset btw, 8:10am-ish in Greenwich. I was accompanied by my fellow Flamsteed Astronomer friend, Helen who is even more a moon chaser than me, and I suspect has some better pictures as usual.
But I had calculated the moonset transit behind the Shard with the help of Google Earth, Stellarium and a little Python program that I wrote to predict the moon placement against landmarks...and I (or rather my program, Google Earth and stellarium) was spot on! I am going to develop that program a bit more to look more presentable and user friendly then put it up on Github as a free open-source program.
Location: Greenwich
Telescope: Skywatcher Equinox 80
Mount: Celestron Nexstar 8SE
Camera: Canon 650D
ISO: 200
Shutter: 1/1000
f6.3
f/l: 504mm
Software: EOS Utilities (capture), Camera Raw, various adjustments to bring out the almost invisible moon. Photoschop for final levels and curves adjustment and clearing dust bunnies on my well battered camera sensor.
Capture method: Used EOS Utilities on a Dell XPS13 Ultrabook tethered to camera to shoot the moonset. the 13inch screen helps me see the images live and, in more comfort, even though it's a cumbersome setup.
Timelapse info: 206 frames, variable speed because I ended up manually snapping away every second as if the world will end if I stopped...and it almost felt like it as gusts were up to 30mph on this deceptively clear sky morning.
Processing the timelapse was challenging as the exposures were dropping up and down due to a chimney bellowing smoke at the moon-shard transit (another indication of the high winds). All fun, though, as I relearn how to do timelapses.
I used Lightroom for sequencing, visual adjustments, dust cleansing and exposure smoothing then photoshop for rendering. Then Da Vinci Resolve for video denoising, lower flickering (by using a cloning track frame shift speed up technique) and lighting effect.
Wolf howling sound from Universfield:
pixabay.com/users/universfield-28281460/