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Another visit to Torbay and so I couldn't help myself but to go for another Alignment shot. This time, I got lucky with a thin slot or sky on the horizon (and not coming a cropper on the rock face I had to clamber across and perch on to get this).
Jupiter, Saturn and Venus lining up in the evening sky above the Tihany peninsula (Lake Balaton, Hungary)
This is the third largest galaxy in our local group of galaxies. It lies about 2.7 million light years away. You can find it in the Triangulum Constellation.
Captured during new moon on November 14 from my back yard in South Calgary (Bortle 8)
This is 18 x 10 minute exposures calibrated with flats, darks, and bias frames.
Camera: ZWO ASI533mc-pro
Scope: Orion 80EDT-cf f/6
Mount: Celestron AVX
Filter: Optolong L-Pro 48mm
Guiding: PHD2 using an Orion SSAG guide camera
Mount Control: CPWI
Polar and Star Alignment: SharpCap and CPWI
Image acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro
Stacking, calibration, and processing: PixInsight and Adobe Photoshop
White, red, and now yellow and GitD opaque make a nice little team. It would be awesome to find a torso, they're surely out there.
Winter is officially here, and the morning temperatures are quite in alignment with that fact. Here's another backyard ice-shot from this past weekend, with the 135mm Jupiter 37A.
With the Sun having risen in all its glory, an interesting play of light and shadow sets up across the vast, perfectly flat expanse of a flooded Badwater. Before us, the more than two mile high wall of the Panamint Range abruptly rises on the western side from alluvial fans to sheer mountain cliffs coated by recent snow. 11,049 foot tall Telescope Peak takes center stage here glistening in the sun. And a comparatively very short distance behind this photographer the Black Mountains rise even more abruptly more than a mile high. While the Sun has traveled all the way down the face of the Panamints, the vast saltwater lake here remains in shadow from the Black Mountains. As a result the salty water is reflecting nothing but deep blue sky and the salty ridges that stick up remain dark. By chance I found myself presented with an uncanny alignment of a salt ridge that very closely echoes the profile of the Panamint Mountain reflection. The dark, shadowed salty mud traces the contour pretty well, complete with a dip to account for Telescope Peak's tallest reflection.
I don't think these are particularly good shots and I probably wouldn't have posted them except for the fact that I was shocked how well they lined up. Not only the angle but the wheel wells also. I wasn't even trying to do this. Funny how things like this happen. Maybe it says something about our internal levels. Or it's just random.
I have been telling my wife that this particular rock with a single mortar at Vargas Plateau must have been special to the Natives in the past. From here, it aligns with the California oak that I posted yesterday and all the way to Mission Peak. This must have served as an observation post because it has a command view of the Bay.
I find it easy to imagine the people building this church, which was finished in 1903, using the line of the rising Milky Way to set the angle for their little building’s roof gable. There wouldn’t have been as much man-made dust in the air nor light pollution to dim their view back then, giving the locals an unobstructed vista of the heavens on a cloudless night.
Mind you the air was clear and the night quite dark when I visited the small sanctuary in April of 2019, evidenced by how much of the fine details in the Milky Way’s dust lanes my photo has captured. The colours of a number of the nebulae in the star-forming region of Rho Ophiuchi have also shown up nicely in the photo. Not visible in the photo, and certainly lost to my eyes on the night, is the cap for one of my lenses, dropped as I was stumbling through the darkness, looking for an interesting composition to shoot. Perhaps if I make the 400+ kilometre round-trip back there one day, I might find my piece of protective plastic still laying in the grass.
I used nine separate overlapping photos to create this composite “vertical panorama” image. My Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, fitted with a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 6.0 seconds @ ISO 6400, did a splendid job of sucking as much light out of the sky as possible to record each of those nine frames.
Light dusting of snow on top of the leaf litter serves to emphasise the undulations of the ground. Begs the question, what lies underneath to cause these depressions in the first place...
Venus, Mars, and the crescent moon align with Pigeon Point Lighthouse on the California coast.
Single exposure with only Lightroom adjustments
Sony A7S, Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 @f/2.8, 200mm, 1 second, ISO12,800
More info, for the truly geeky:
I knew this alignment was coming several weeks ago and put a reminder on my calendar for the afternoon to come up with a shot for it. I knew that the planets and moon were going to be roughly 260-270 degrees as they approached the horizon and started looking at westerly foregrounds. Since the sun was well down by the time the planets and moon were going to be close to the horizon, I knew that the foreground either had to be a very strong silhouette or self-lit (like the GG Bridge, city skyline, etc). There was a possible shot from Treasure Island of the South Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge, but I just didn't want to drive into the city yesterday, so kept looking.
I found that the alignment matched very well with typical shooting locations for Pigeon Point Lighthouse. I like the lighthouse, but it presents some pretty daunting challenges; fog, sea spray, moisture in the air, and the very bright lights from the hostel and the beacon itself. Nevertheless, I set out for the lighthouse around 5:00pm to give myself enough time
I knew I was going to be at 200mm (or more) for the shot, which means that I would need to keep the shutter duration at 2 seconds or less to avoid streaking the planets, stars, and surface of the moon. This requires a pretty high ISO (12,800 or more) at f/2.8 (and even higher at f/4) to be able to preserve any detail in the foreground. I decided to keep my 70-200 f/2.8 instead of adding the extender to give it more reach, but at the loss of a stop of light.
I took a bunch of test shots as the planets and moon were setting and the sky got darker and darker as the sun got further below the horizon. I settled on exposure brackets centered around 0.5s at f/2.8. Shooting 5 shots at 1eV steps, this gave me exposures from 2s down to 1/4s. I ended up using the 1s exposure. All at ISO12,800.
The moon is incredibly challenging, even when in crescent phase. The sunlit portion is WAY too many stops above anything else in the sky and on the ground. I decided to let the sunlit crescent blow out and went for details in the earthshine portion of the moon. By making this decision, I was able to use a single exposure to make the image. There is a lot of highlight and shadow recovery going on here, but the Sony A7S image holds up pretty well. There is noise, of course, but it is very well behaved.
I believe that this image would not be possible without the A7S. Keeping the stars and planets from streaking at 200mm requires very short shutter durations. This requires bumping up the ISO to 12,800 or even 25,600. The ISO performance and Dynamic Range of the sensor at these ISOs allows long-lens astro-landscape photography to become a reality (without compositing)
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