night sky photography

The Field Guide in the Shooting Stars eBook includes a short description of how to find ten most commonly used settings for night sky photography of the moon and stars (astrophotography) on all of the following cameras.

If you have purchased Shooting Stars eBook previously, you can update to Version 4 with the entire new section on 'Tracking the Stars' - an introduction to long-exposure astrophotography, and image processing, with the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer or other portable equatorial tracking mounts.

Referring to your existing copy of the eBook, use the title of Page 24 as a 'Promo Code' in the shopping cart (not case sensitive), for a 75% discount and get your updated copy of Shooting Stars for just $4.95. 

Geminid Meteor Shower - Composite Image - Monday 14th and Tuesday 15th December 2020

Despite living in the southern hemisphere, with no moon and a clear night or two forecast, I decided to have a crack at capturing Geminid meteors in December 2020. But I was a bit rusty.

The tonne of astrophotography equipment that I hauled to Idaho and back for the total solar eclipse in August had remained in the shed until the week before this lunar eclipse, and most of it till eclipse day itself. With summer at Camp Cooinda and a job that doesn't shut down over the holiday period either it was time to dust things off, put them back together and hastily remember how to use them. A sensible approach would be to focus on just one or two cameras, but as usual I couldn't resist putting all my cameras into service and aiming for one of everything.. widefield, timelapse, composite, tele-photo and telescopic images of the eclipse.

The evening 'highlight' of six days back country skiing in NSW with Tim and Eric was the planetary alignment of Venus, Mercury and Jupiter in the evening sky. I had only a compact Canon Powershot G1X Mark II with me and it took a few nights to get the weather and scenery to cooperate but after an hour of trapsing around and lying down in the snow and wind I managed to capture this shot on our last night out.

Planets align over snowy mountains under moonlight (from bottom Venus, Mercury, Jupiter)
Canon Powershot G1X Mark II, Panorama 2 x 10 secs, f3.5, ISO400

Inspired by Harald Moltke - Painter of the Aurora

There are two key messages about what you see in this video:

• All of the digital imagery is animated and displayed in real-time.
• Colours have been de-saturated to match the visual appearance.

It's no surprise that seeing the aurora is on many people's 'bucket list'. But with the proliferation of digital images and timelapse videos of the aurora, those same people may travel with unrealistic expectations of what they will see with their own eyes.