Really big night sky panorama.

A while back I took a bunch of night sky photographs from our orchard. a few of them where looking across at Waihola with the night sky above. I have been seeing allot of really nice looking panoramic images that have the milky way curving overhead and have been wanting to try to make one of my own. 

I took an 11 photo panorama with the intention of stitching them together at some point. The stitching together part proved to be much more involved then I had originally thought. I ended up having to manually put all of the images together and then do allot of Photoshop futzing with each image to get them to align properly. Then came colour correction and lighting to try and merge the colours and lighting better.

The result is still not perfect so I'm going to have to try again with a new set of images. For a beginning try it didn't come out too bad.

11 Photo Large format panorama of the night sky over Waihola.

Startrails, stacking method with Tutorial

I have been doing a little research lately about some different methods to create night sky imagery. Mainly in an effort to improve my own night sky images. 

I came across this method of creating star trail images while looking for ways to fix my problems with exposure in star trails. Basically what you do is take a whole bunch of images on a tripod using a remote timer and then use a computer program to "Stack" the images together. This method gives you far greater control over the exposure level of the final image and allows you to get trails that are as long as you want. The more images you have the longer the trails.

I used Photoshop to create this image using some of the images I took to create a time lapse earlier last month.

Star trail created using stacked images.

Here's how.

1. In Photoshop go to: File then down to Scripts and select "Load Files into Stack".
2. A new window will pop up. Select "Browse" and locate the files that you wish to stack.
3. Select ALL of the files you want to import, click "OK". they will all appear in the use files box in the window. (Don't worry about checking the "register images" box if your images where taken using a tripod.) Click "OK".
4. Photoshop will load all of the images into a single file on many layers. This may take a while depending on the amount of images in your stack.
5. Once complete, Select all of the layers except the bottom most one.
6. In the blend mode pull down menu on the layers tab select "Lighten".
7. You should now have a whole lot of star trails.
8. Flatten the image and "Save As" something new so you don't loose any of your original images.

Dark Sky

It was another lovely clear dark sky again last night so I was out again with my camera. This time I had an idea to try and get an image with one of the newly opened flowers on our camellia bush in the foreground and the night sky as a backdrop. Well that plan went out of the window after I had taken a couple of initial images. It was just too dark to see anything of the foreground apart from the silhouette of the leaves and a very slight pink smudge where the flower should be. 

I will have to wait until the moon is out again at night and in the first quarter or last quarter phase so its not too bright to get the shot I was after. Still the silhouette is really nice so I'll post them anyway!

Ta Geoff

 

1st Timelapse, how not to do things!

Well, we have been having some really great weather lately for stargazing!

Last Wednesday was a fantasticly clear and crisp night, so I decided to give a time-lapse sequence a try. My sequence of images is of a 3 hour timespan of the night sky.

NightSky Timelapse from Geoff Ind on Vimeo.

For the sequence I was taking 30 second exposures at 10mm, ISO 6400 and F-Stop 4. I was using a remote timer on my camera so taking a long sequence of images becomes allot easier once you have everything set up. 

From my results I have learned heaps and will definitely be making changes to the way that I approach my set up on my next attempt at a Time-lapse sequence.

• Firstly - After looking at my results I have decided that I need to spend more time working on the composition of the shot before going ahead and starting to shoot. The old adage "Preparation is key" really is true in this case. The portrait orientation in my sequence really does not work in the final video format. It just is not very "cinematic" and detracts from the sequence as a whole.

• Secondly - Looking at the speed of the sequence, I really need to be taking more images to get a decent length of shot. This means I need to either shoot for longer or change my initial exposure settings to shorter length exposures to end up with allot more images. Next time I'm going to try shooting 15 second exposures and therefore potentially double the length of the shot.

• Thirdly - I need to find a way to prevent moisture build up on my equipment. The spreading fogginess of the shot towards the end is a result of a build up of dew on my camera. When I came back to retrieve the camera the whole lot was covered in water drops. Needless to say that's probably not good for my camera, lenses and timer. So a solution needs to be found when shooting on cold nights.

• Lastly - My camera ran out of battery before my sequence finished, I fully charged the battery just before starting my shoot. Unfortunately I only got 115 images of the 220 I had asked for. More experimentation needs to be done to find a way around this problem. My camera only has one battery and no way to directly plug my camera into the mains power. I know that ambient temperature affects the life of the battery, as it was cold the night I was shooting. It would be worth experimenting on warmer nights to see what the difference is (if any).

Thanks for reading, I hope that you get something from my errors on how not to go about time-lapse photography!

Ta Geoff.

Attempt at Star trails...

Last Friday was another beautiful clear day. I decided to head out in the evening to try and get a few more night sky images. I headed over to an area I know of which has some really nice looking mature trees and heaps of huge boulders, in an effort to get some really interesting foregrounds in my images.

Because I have been doing a bit of night sky photography lately I wanted to try something I haven't attempted before, Star trails! In a nut shell taking star trails involves leaving the shutter of the camera open while the stars move by overhead. This results in the stars appearing to leave circular trails behind them in the image as they move across the sky.

The conditions started out really great for night sky photography with great visibility but extremely cold temperatures. I started off with some 10 minute exposures so that I could see the trailing of the stars in my images and get an idea of exposure settings without having to wait for ages between shots. After taking 2 or 3 of these images making adjustments to settings and composition, I decided to go for a long 30 minute shot!

Unfortunately about half way through my shot it decided to get really foggy. We live next to a lake and in the winter it gets really thick and foggy most of the time. I decided to keep the exposure going and see what it came out like. Fortunately it didn't stay foggy for too long, the breeze started to pick up and blew most of the fog away from my location and revealed the sky again for the last 10 minutes or so. The resulting image has a slightly indistinct foreground but the stars are still really clear. Completely an accident but really cool nonetheless!

First decent Star trail image. (30min Exp at F5.6 ISO 800)

I took some normal night sky shots just before packing up at around 10pm just to see what they came out like with the darker skies at that time (At the moment the moon is up mostly during the day and is in the first quarter phase so it was really dark).

In future I want to do more experimenting with star trails. I think I need to use a higher F-stop value, and lower ISO speed, but even longer exposure times. 30 minutes still did not give very long trails but the settings I used resulted in a very bright image. Which I had to adjust in camera raw (this is the reason I shoot in raw and then adjust later on the computer). I also want to have a crack at creating a time lapse sequence of the milky way moving across the sky. Lots to look forward too!

Gulf Harbour Observatory (GHO)

GHO was my first ever Observatory. It is a "Skyshed Pod Dome" which are made in Canada. 

Gulf Harbour Observatory (GHO).

Gulf Harbour Observatory (GHO).

The POD is a really neat design, it is modular and only takes half a day to a day to put together, and only requires one to two people to build. It comes in a variety of colours to suit your tastes and location. I got the "Arctic white" version which looks very striking in the landscape. The one I went to see and play with before I bought one was Tan for the walls and White for the dome.

The Pod Itself is 3 meters in diameter and just under 3 meters tall at the apex of the dome. I have the standard kit but you can add equipment pods instead of the normal wall sections which add more space to put computer equipment etc out of the way of the main floor area where your telescope/tripod/pier is located.

I had a pier which I had constructed while doing the deck platform for the Ob to sit on. The Pier was concrete and timber with a meter square footing and was isolated from the deck platform to cut out vibration to the telescope while walking around the observatory.

construction for my new Ob location will be very similar, I have not yet decided on whether to have a pier again, or use my telescope tripod. The location will play a part in the decision as the new observatory will be a part of a lookout platform that is going to go on the stump of a 130ish year old Macrocarpa tree that we have on our now property in Otago. the Stump is over 2 meters tall and is nearly 3 meters wide at its widest. Making a pier that is that long is probably a bad idea, and I don't think that Ill be able to dig a big enough footing for the pier because of the roots around the stump anyway.

I intend to do a few articles on the design and build process for the new Ob as and when I do it, so keep your eyes out for that one. It promises to be a very interesting and challenging project!

Adding the mount to the pier.

Posing in the new Ob.

Posing in the new Ob.

Posing in the new Ob.

Old images taken at GHO

While im waiting to build new observatory here at home I thought I'd add some old photos which I took up in Auckland at my old observatory "Gulf Harbour Observatory" or GHO for short.

Firstly my favourite shot of our moon, our closest neighbour.

Our Moon

And now some images of things further away but quite a bit larger!

Globular cluster (M5 I think.)

Open cluster, unsure which though.

M42, the Orion Nebula.

I took all of the images using my 8 inch Skywatcher Newtonian telescope, with the camera at prime focus (meaning the camera is attached to the telescope and the telescope becomes the lens of the camera).

The deep sky objects where by far the hardest to get images of. At the time when I took these images I was still finding my way around the night sky (I still am!), and the two different clusters I just stumbled on and was not actually looking for specifically. The Orion nebula was the easiest to find, being on the belt of the Orion constellation. But it was the hardest of the three to get a good picture of, because of the longer exposure time needed to get the detail. I didn't have a star tracker, or know how to properly align my telescope at the time of capturing these images, which is why in the case of the Orion nebula especially the image is not very sharp. Still its the best image I have taken to date and as such I'm really pleased with it.

My picture of the Globular cluster is extremely red because of a dirty great street light which was right next to my observatories old location. Fortunately the new location where it will be built is no where near any such light pollution so I shouldn't get any more images like that (fingers crossed!).

If anyone does know what the two cluster images are for sure then please let me know as I would love to know!

Winter Otago Sky, July 2015

Hello and welcome to this new blog!

I will be using this blog as a place to share my love of the night sky. I am very lucky here in Otago to have reasonably dark skies for observing and taking night sky photographs.

At the moment I am waiting for the opportunity to can re-build my observatory which I dismantled and brought with me from Auckland. I am hoping to have it back up and running sometime this summer (fingers crossed!).

In the mean time I have been trying to get some night sky photography in using my Canon 500D camera and a tripod. I took some nice images last weekend, these are my favourites.