The Draconid Meteor Shower 2011

Posted on October 8, 2011

Tonight the Draconid meteor shower peaked, the meteors radiating from a point just next to the star Beta Draconis in the constellation Draco. It was stronger than normal, so I decided to defy the nearly full Moon and try to catch my first meteor.

My initial plan was to use my new motorized equatorial mount, but that was perhaps a bit too ambitious. I had not yet practiced aligning it, and standing outside in the dark fumbling with the numerous controls was very frustrating. When the first meteors started to draw trails across the sky I gave up and went inside to get my faithful tripod.

After a bit of fumbling with the focus, I set the camera to take a series of 10 second exposures and stepped back to watch the show. Imagine my joy when a clear meteor shot across the sky right in my field of view! :) I caught a total of three meteors before clouds started drifting in. The first – my first ever! – was also the most luminous. The three most luminous stars in the image are part of the Draco constellation.

 

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More Star Birds

Posted on March 9, 2011

I have spent about one hour this evening shooting the Cassiopeia constellation using the same techniques as last night. It took a little longer than intended because an airplane decided to ruin my first round of exposures. They really should plan their routes a bit better. ;)

I also had my first go at light graffiti. During a normal exposure I shone a laser at some dark trees and drew a figure. It took a couple of tries to get it right. The trees were so far away that even the smallest movements were blown up, so the figure is a bit shaky.

 

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Star Birds

Posted on March 8, 2011

Tonight I had fun trying to reproduce this APOD.

For the first round of images I programed my remote timer to take a 10 second exposure every 30 seconds. That gave me more than enough time to adjust the focus and the camera to do its noise reduction thing. I started with the focus dial turned all the way to right (as far away from focus as possible), and then moved it a little bit left between each exposure. When I reached the far left I repeated the process going from left to right. The result you can see to the left.

I like it. It looks like strange star birds flying in Orion formation. ;) And check out the beautiful colors: most of the stars are blue giants, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant and then there is the purple Orion Nebula.

The camera focuses at infinity a little while before the focus dial reaches the far left, so the stars looks like toffees rather than butterflies. The individual stars wobble a bit between the exposures, probably due to a combination of the strong wind and my unsteady dial-turning hand.

For the second round of images I programed my remote timer to take a 10 second exposure every 20 seconds, and I tried to make smaller changes to the focus for each step.

The wings are more smooth but the centre is still a bit bumpy. I did consider going out again for a third round but the cold got the better of me (and I even wore two jackets), so that will have to wait for another clear night.

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Vega

Posted on February 21, 2011

Last night was the third clear night in a row. And, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute, the last one before I leave Bønnerup. In stead of just hanging around on the summer house balcony I packed my gear and walked north towards the sea. I wanted to shoot Vega, the fifth brightest star in the night sky, and it hangs very low over the northern horizon this time of year. There is a small harbour not too far from the summer house and I walked all the way to the end of the western pier. It was freezingly cold but also wonderfully dark. I could even see the outline of the Milky Way.

I pointed my camera at Vega, focused and started shooting a series of images. Because Vega is relatively far from Polaris it moves quite fast across the sky. I wanted each image to show nearly point like stars, so I only exposed each image for 30 seconds.

For some reason all the images came out wrong. Or at least not as I had intended. The camera seemed less sensitive to the light, and increasing the ISO did not help that much. Also, the colors are very dark. I do not know why. I hope it has something to do with the weather conditions that night and is not a permanent problem. I am a bit worried about frost damage from the night before.

I noticed the problems on my first couple of test images but I decided to continue. I took about 60 exposures before the cold got too intense and I hurried home. Turns out that last night was one of the coldest nights in the past 12 years.

I used Photoshop to stack the images as usual. But this time I did something a little different. I have seen people use Morse code to write their names in the stars and thought: why not let Vega write its own name? This is why I wanted short exposures, images where the stars are dots in stead of dashes.

Despite the exposure and color problems I think the result is pretty cool. You can really see the different colours of the stars. Vega is of course the bright white star in the middle, and the orange shimmer near the horizon is light from the city Aalborg reflected by cirrostratus clouds. Come another clear night I will try again, maybe with a different star.

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Star Trails

Posted on February 20, 2011

I am still at my parents’ summer house in Bønnerup, Jutland. Last night was very beautiful and clear, and I spent more than four hours shooting star trails.

Like the previous night I started by pointing my camera directly at Polaris. This time, however, I programmed my remote timer to take many short exposures in stead of one long exposure. I used an ISO of 400 and maximum aperture. Each exposure was 1 minute long, and there was a gap of 1 second between them. After nearly two hours the battery in my camera died and left me with 117 images.

I used Photoshop to stack the images. On a few of them an airplane had passed through or a speck suddenly appeared but I decided to use them anyway to avoid creating gaps in the star trails. I think the specks might have been satellites passing through. According to Stellarium the satellite Radio Sputnik 15 was roughly in the same position at the same time as this speck:

The first hour’s worth of images produced the following star trails:

Pretty, isn’t it? :) I especially like how the different colours of the stars stand out. The bright blue-white stars in the top left corner are part of the Cassiopeia constellation, and the single bright white star all the way to the right is part of the Big Dipper.

After nearly two hours the star trails looked like this:

For some reason the background in the second half of the images was a lot lighter than the background in the first half of the images. I suspect it had something to do with the camera getting warmer and thus producing more noise. The two hour long star trails did not stand out as much as the one hour long star trails did, but they were long! :)

When the camera battery had recharged I pointed the camera west towards a group of trees. Time for some scenic star trails! Repeating the procedure from last time, I took a series of 1 minute long exposures. After shooting 79 images the camera’s battery died again. When I went to get the camera I noticed that the camera and the tripod were covered in rime and that the lens was all fogged up. I am just glad the camera toughed it out long enough to take 79 images.

Going through the images in Photoshop I found an airplane in two of the last images. To avoid any gaps in the trails I just removed the last images from the stack which left me with 73 images – more than one hour of action.

I must admit I was amazed by the result. The star trails are so beautiful, and the dark trees really complete the image. It almost looks as though I know what I am doing. ;)

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