Perseid Meteor Shower

For my latest assignment for the HCCVB blog, Mom and I packed blankets, lawn chairs, my camera, tripod, and remote trigger, and we headed to McCloud Nature Park to see the Perseid Meteor Shower.

This annual meteor shower peaked over the weekend (very convenient), and at its height, experts predicted that we could see up to 60 meteors per hour. We didn't see nearly that many (it happened in the wee hours of the morning...way past my bedtime), but in the couple hours we were gazing, we did get to see some great shooting stars.

This park hosts the Indiana Astronomy Society once a month during the summer, and they welcome the public to come for free and peer through the eyepiece of their telescopes. The program on Saturday night was a special event for the meteor shower, and I wasn't sure how many people we'd be joining. Mom and I actually looked at each other and said, "Well, we could be the only people there, but that's okay."

So we were wonderfully surprised when we drove into the park and saw a full parking lot and dozens of people already camped out, waiting for darkness to fall. By the time it was truly dark, there were more than 100 people there. I was thrilled to see that kind of turnout for a park program.

It's been years since I did any night sky photography, and this just got me itching to do more!

Stargazing at McCloud Nature Park

I will never forget the first time I looked through the eyepiece on a telescope and saw the rings of Saturn with my own two eyes. Sure, I’d been learning about our solar system for years in science class at school, but truly grasping the existence of other planets and celestial bodies can only go so far when you’re learning from a textbook.

Seeing it for yourself, though, even if it’s small and hasn’t been richly colored in photo-editing software—seeing the rings of Saturn, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, and multiple moons orbiting these planets… it makes it all real. Read more... 

70/365 Full moon

Imagine what it would be like living on a planet orbited by multiple moons. Our lone moon captivates quite a bit of our human attention as it is; do you think it would escalate exponentially with more?

Would the obsession with nocturnal creatures (i.e. the Cullens) become even more stratospheric?

Seeing as how we're not likely to acquire any more moons in the foreseeable future, I'll stick to enjoying this one. I'll also enjoy the fact that getting photos like this with my latest lens is possible without serious amounts of cropping. And that's pretty darn cool.


Camera: Canon 40D with 70-300mm IS lens, 1/125s, f/5.6 at ISO 100 and 300mm at about 9:30 p.m.

194/365 October moon

I looked up the other night and saw this striking and unusual ring around the moon.

I've seen halos around the moon and sun before, but this one was really interesting.

I, of course, came back and did some googling about it. The most common answer to the question of what it's called is a 22° halo. They occur around the sun most often, but can occur around the moon as well.

But here's what I find puzzling and interesting: All of the sites I found that describe this optical phenomena mention that they have a tinge of red inside the halo.

If you look closely at this one, though, the red tinge seems to be on the outside of the ring instead.

I may have to do some further research to find out why. Or maybe it's due to our closeness to Halloween.

Creepy.

Camera: Canon 40D, 1/40s, f/4 at ISO 1600 at about 10:15 p.m.

346/365 Venus blazing

I looked in the sky last week for a glimpse of Comet Lulin with no luck. This pale green comet was supposed to be visible with binoculars, but on the nights I tried looking, either the light pollution or cloud cover obscured my view.

But in the opposite direction on the last two nights, Venus has been absolutely stunning. It looks like a fluorescent bulb in the sky.

In this photo, you can see the fainter star trails near the top of the frame, and Venus is the bright white streak in the middle. You can see it unaided; all you have to do is look directly west after sunset, and you can't miss it.

Camera: Canon 40D, about 15 minutes, f/8 at ISO 100 around 8:30 p.m.

266/365 Bright and beautiful

I noticed the incredible full moon this week before I started hearing about it on the news.

I get up at about 5:45 each morning for work, and on Wednesday or Thursday, I immediately noticed how bright the moonlight was.

It looked as though I could have driven to work in the glow, unaided by headlights, and would have been able to see just fine. The crisp, defined shadows cast by the light alone were amazing.

As it turns out, this is the biggest and brightest full moon we've had in 15 years. It has happened because of the moon's proximity to Earth at this point in its egg-shaped orbit. Full moons occur every month, but this one is especially spectacular.

I don't have an especially long zoom lens, but I nevertheless made sure I photographed it. (I did some generous cropping to get this close-up.)

Camera: Canon 40D 1/1000s, f/4.5 at ISO 400 at about 10:45 p.m.

234/365 Star trails

April 2008 was the last time I did a night sky photo, and I haven't made any of these photos with my 40D. Last night I set up my camera and ran back and forth from the camera outside to Dancing with the Stars inside.

I must say, the 40D quality is vastly superior to the Rebel! The results are crisper and I'm not combating hot pixels.

As I do more of these, I want to concentrate on varying my foreground subjects. I did that here by placing tree branches in the frame, instead of just anchoring the bottom with a more landscape-type scene.

Photographing star trails, and seeing how much the earth revolves in just a matter of minutes, makes me feel very small. It makes me think about how much is out there in the universe, and how we're only on this little speck of a planet in comparison.

Fascinating.

Camera: Canon 40D, shutter speed 17.25 minutes, f/11 at ISO 100 between 7:45 and 8:15 p.m.

24/365 Night Sky

It was finally warm enough for me to spend some time outside last night and work on night sky photography. I discovered last year that I had the ability to do this after I read a couple articles in Popular Photography (here and here). I had previously figured that you needed a fancier camera than mine to pick up the light from the stars... but no!

The problem I've found is the noise I get (shooting digitally, anyways, I haven't tried film) with increasingly longer exposures, mainly in the form of blue and red dots (some call them "hot pixels"). At first I thought, "Wow! It's even picking up the blue and red stars!" But alas, it isn't that exciting. I've done some research, and some people say that cooler temperatures help alleviate the problem. I'll just have to keep experimenting.

Regardless, I love doing this. For one, it's great to be able to run outside on a commercial break of Dancing with the Stars, set up the camera, trip the shutter with my cable release, run back inside, watch the show for 20 minutes or so, run back outside, close the shutter and voila! It wows me every time.

This first photo is of the north sky. The six brightest star trails in the right third of the frame are those of the Big Dipper. I love that this shows the rotation with Polaris at its center. This is approximately a 20-25 minute exposure at f/11, ISO 200.
This second photo is of the west-southwest sky. The brightest stars make up Orion -- see the three main stars of his belt? This exposure used the same settings but lasted about 40 minutes.

Camera: Canon Rebel DSLR.