It is hard to describe how much fun I had shooting widefields from the tripod. A lot of the shots came up out of focus, and several more came up with star trails, but it was just a blast.
Our campsite under the Sagittarius Milky Way.
I really need to build a panorama out of these three, covering the sky from The Summer Triangle in the East to Sagittarius in the West:
Later in the evening, I caught an even further reach of the Milky Way, and an old friend, The Great Andromeda Galaxy, M31 in this shot of Casseiopeia and Perseus:
And finally, in a stroke of luck, I caught this meteor (or perhaps a satellite) tumbling through the frame of this photo:
All images were shot with the Canon 350D, 18-55mm kit lens set to 18mm @ f/5.6, with exposures around 1 minute (some a little longer, some a little shorter; I was timing them by listening to the iPod — “just up to the next chorus”).
It was cloudy on Saturday night, but Sunday night I decided to try out another run at the Cygnus Milky Way.
I have a decently large target list of nebulae that are in the area, but actually a lot of them are in Cepheus (which is not really up far enough to shoot right now), so I thrashed around a little before settling on the nebular complex that includes Sharpless 115, 116, and 112. These 3 nebulae lie near Deneb, on the other side of the star from NGC7000 (The North America nebula).
Like I’ve done for the past few photos, I started the images as soon as I could after dark, then left the mount running all night. By sunup, I had captured 16 frames of 20 minutes each (that’s 5h 20m). Here is the result:
A reminder that the reason these latest images are in B&W is because I’m shooting through a narrowband (13nm passband) Hydrogen-alpha filter. So my full-color images coming out of the DSLR only have data in the “red” channel of the image (the “green” and “blue” channels are essentially empty of useful data). I can go back and re-shoot these objects unfiltered, then use that RGB data to turn these into color images. But for now, all I have is a red channel, so the images appear as levels of grey representing the amount of red data in the image.
I am attempting to work my way around Cygnus, and intended to shoot the region near Sadr (IC1318). This region is large enough that even Pumpkin can only capture a piece of it. Rather than swing around “in the dark” to find the particular chunk I was looking for, I tried to do a web search to find widefield shots of the region, so I could aim more appropriately.
While looking, I ran across a photo of Sharpless 101 (Sh2-101), also known as The Tulip Nebula. There was some interesting nebulosity around the bright region, so I decided to try my hand at this object. Luckily, the Gemini has the Sh2 catalog onboard. So I pointed to the proper section of sky, laid in a sequence of 20min subframes long enough to keep running until sunup, and went to bed after it got started.
I woke up to a screaming mount (it goes beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep when it hits its “safety limit”), turned it off, and went to work. When I got a chance to process this image, this is what I had:
I love my Ha filter. 
Another night, another ton of wispy yummy hydrogen clouds in the summer Milky Way.
The shutter was open for about 4 hours total last night. These have had darks and bias subtracted but no flats (my flat box is dead).
This is all through the Ha filter, of course.
Strangely enough, this object is bright enough in OIII (or Hb?) that there was actually some data in the blue channel (nothing worth adding to the stack, just interesting).
Here is The Veil Nebula. This image shows about 5deg x 3deg.
There are several NGC “objects” in this frame, the two brightest being 6960 (on the right) and 6992 (on the left).
But between them is some crazy wispy detail that I have never had the FOV to capture before. Cool. Pumpkin pulls in a ton of sky. I sort of wish I could get a flat field without a focal reducer (I do *not* need 0.8x on this image), but oh well. This nebula is a lot dimmer than NGC7000, so I got a lot less detail even though it’s a fairly long integration. The things you find out. I’m working my way through the H-alpha regions in Cygnus.
Those are awesome!
There is a light near the upper right-hand corner (about 2 x 1 in)
that shows. Any idea? a distant town?
Amazing how bright it looks under a full moon.
-A
On Nov 25, 2007 1:19 PM, Jimbo S. Harris <jimbo@jimbo.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We’re back from our trip to the Grand Canyon. There are daylight photos to
> process yet, but I wanted to share my “astronomy” photos from the trip.
> Friday night was clear and cold (low 20’s F; the dogs’ water bowl froze in
> about 20 minutes), with a full moon blazing away. So of course I felt
> compelled to go and shoot the canyon with some stars.
>
> I had a minimalist rig with me; just a camera and a tripod. Since I was
> without a laptop, I had to wait to see what I captured until I got back to
> CA, just like in pioneer times. (:
>
> There’s a fine line between exposing detail and having an image that’s
> convincingly “shot at night”, especially when the moon’s that bright.
>
> My results are up on http://www.jimbo.net/astro/category/long-exposure-photography/widefield/
>
> Enjoy.
>
> Jimbo
>
>
–
Anthony
IN CARNARI FUMIDUS VICTUS
Not strictly qualifying as “astronomy” photos, these are a set of photos that I shot while on a trip to the Grand Canyon over Thanksgiving 2007. It was a full moon night, so the canyon was lit up pretty brightly. In editing the photos, I found that there was a very fine line between bringing out all the detail that I could see by moonlight and yet ending up with a shot that didn’t look like it was shot during daylight.
That’s Mars rising over the eastern horizon in the background.
The first shot I took wasn’t in great focus, but I picked up a lot of cool color in the canyon, so it stays.
In order to pick up deatils at night, I had to set the camera up for 30 second exposures (the longest I can take without extra equipment). It’s impossible to hold still for that long. Kristi and Brett waiting patiently in the cold(!) for me to finish shooting.
The blown-out blob in the upper right-hand corner is the moon. Taurus rising over the canyon.
The most “astronomy-looking” photo of the bunch, this is shot with my back to the canyon (and to the rising moon).
Hi Jimbo,
I liked the dark horse image in particular. Looks good.
Alex
On Aug 7, 2006, at 11:58 AM, Jimbo S. Harris wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Now that the Ad Astra Observatory at Newark is up and running, I’ve
> been shooting a lot of sky lately. Doing this also reminded me to
> go back and poke through my backlog from last year’s astrophotos
> and see if I’d forgotten to upload anything to the website. I’m
> embarrassed to say that, in fact, I forgot to upload quite a bit of
> stuff from last year’s star parties in Shingletown, CA and
> Clearwater, WA. So I spent a little time over the weekend (the
> moon’s too bright for photography right now) wading through those
> shots and getting my processing workflow going again.
>
> So, there are several new astrophotos on my website http://
> www.jimbo.net/astro. There are “NEW!” icons next to the pages with
> new content, and the same icons appear next to the new images
> themselves, to help you find them. If I had an older image of the
> same object, I’ve put the new stuff to the left and increasingly
> older stuff going to the right, so you can see how the mojo has
> been progressing with practice…
>
> There’s more stuff to come from the backlog (several widefield
> photos at least are still hanging out there), and the backlog has
> started up of stuff shot from the observatory, too (not to mention
> photos *of* the observatory, both during construction and under
> use), so keep your eyes peeled for more shots to come soon. The
> moon’s only getting brighter this week…
>
> Keep looking up,
> Jimbo
> PS: For the ADD folks, the pics of M8, M16, M20, M31, and the Dark
> Horse widefield are all from Shingletown 2005. M27 and M13 are from
> AAON 2006. There’s a new Jupiter animation from a month ago, too,
> but you’ve already seen that one, right?
>
>
>
A widefield shot towards the center of the Milky Way galaxy in the vicinity of Scorpius and Sagittarius.
Note the “Dark Horse” Nebula, an extensive dust cloud that resembles a rearing horse.
The upper left corner of the image is blotted out because this was one of the first shots from my new Nikon DSLR, and I had not yet learned how to apply dark frames for noise reduction to remove the amp glow in this corner.
Shot while up in Shingletown, CA during July 2005 and finally(!) processed and uploaded in August 2006…
A widefield shot of the Milky Way galaxy in the vicinity of Cygnus the Swan and Aquila the Eagle.
Note the “Great Rift”, an dust cloud that blots out most of the stars along the centerline of the photo.
The lower right corner of the image is blotted out because this was one of the first shots from my new Nikon DSLR, and I had not yet learned how to apply dark frames for noise reduction to remove the amp glow in this corner (the camera was “upside down” while shooting this photo).
Shot while up in Shingletown, CA during July 2005 and finally(!) processed and uploaded in August 2006…
M6, M7 open clusters in Scorpius, and surrounds.
One of the first shots from my new Nikon D70 DSLR.