Ken_Lord's photostream  

View of a waning sliver of the moon out my bedroom window, lit by earthshine on the dark side, at 7am while I got ready to go to work. Mt. Baker is poking out between the trees.

The star to the left of the moon - I must check, I wonder if it's really Saturn, or perhaps Mercury?

I also wonder if the dark cloud over Mt. Baker is so dark because it's in the shadow of the mountain as the sun creeps up.

Canon T1i DSLR, 1/10 second, ISO 1600, F5.6, 55mm

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Featured on Universe Today on December 26, 2011!

www.universetoday.com/92139/astrophotos-christmas-crescen...

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Hey, I finally looked it up ... that was Mercury! woohoo!

Here's why Howe Street is closed between Georgia and Robson this morning ... Yes that's a man on a ledge on the outside of the Vancouver Art Gallery

Hopefully he's a climber, not a jumper.

A single 30 second exposure, one of 50 that was stacked to make the preceeding image.

Bright star is the left-most star in Orion's belt. Flame nebula is on the left. Horsehead nebula is hiding in the lower right quadrant.

Canon T1i DSLR ISO1600, 190mm Skywatcher Maksutov Newtonian telescope.

My first attempt at the Horsehead nebula (faint, lower right quadrant). It's a dark nebula seen due to being back-lit by hydrogen gas that is glowing red. The bright star is the left-most star in Orion's belt. The obvious nebula on the left is the Flame nebula.

The Horsehead Nebula is more obvious in the larger view - click on it.

I shot 75x 30 second exposures at ISO1600, with a Canon T1i DSLR on a 190mm Maksutov Newtonian telescope. I tossed out the worst 25 exposures leaving 50.

I stacked it in Deepsky Stacker with a master dark frame. Then since I didn't use flat frames, vignetting was levelled out in Pixinsight. After stretching it back in DSS, the dark structure of the nebulae was enhanced, and the image sharpened using Pixinsight 1.7.

It's pretty crude, and over processed to try and bring out the faint Horsehead nebula, but I'm happy that I could detect it with a stack of 30 second exposures. It's not visible in the individual raw exposures, even the Flame nebula is just a faint smudge before stacking.

The red glow around the horsehead nebula is Hydrogen Alpha emissions, a shade of red that is mostly filtered out by stock DSLR cameras, I'll need longer exposures to make up for this.

Timelapse movie of the 2011-12-10 Lunar eclipse as seen from Maple Ridge British Columbia, Canada.

Timlapse covers the time from 4:41am to 6:20am Pacific time. From the time just before first contact of the umbra until 15 minutes into totality when the moon went behind clouds and my neighbour's roof.

Roughly 1100 photos, one shot every 5 seconds. Exposures range from 1/250 ISO 400 to 3.2 seconds ISO 800

Camera: Canon T1i DSLR
Telescope: Orion Apex 127mm Maksutov Cassegrain on an LXD75 mount

I had a few mishaps shooting this. I started late. My laptop crashed right when I started shooting. My mount alignment was off so you'll see the moon being re-centered a few times, and the exhaust frommy neighbour's furnace was blowing across my line of sight, so the image often goes blurry. It was fun to shoot, and I guess I learned a couple things for the next eclipse in 2014 :)