Failed Venus transit

Ok, so I got up early to try and see the Venus transit from sunrise. As you can see in the photo it was a bit cloudy at the horizon and clear sky above. Actually if the photo had shown more above me it would've shown a completely clear sky above my head. Unfortunately the Sun is not above my head at sunrise. The clouds moved from North to South which meant the Sun was behind the clouds pretty much the whole time. It was also too windy to project the Sun onto a piece of white paper. Excuses, excuses, excuses. Truth is I should've been more prepared and gotten a piece of welder glass or some "eclipse glasses" so I at least could've seen the transit in the gaps between the clouds, but hey, only 105 years until next time. I'm sure I will have been able to prepare for it by then...

Yes I know there are a lot of trees in the way in the photo, but I was on my way back from a big open field (a.k.a. a golf course) when I took it.

Weird thing in a night photo

The other week I was testing what it would look like if I took a night photo towards North and had a tree or two that's lit up in the foreground. This 30 second exposure didn't turn out too bad (besides the fact that I missed North and Polaris isn't in the shot), but what's that up in the sky?

Here's a 100% crop of it. Part of it looks like clouds, but the pink/purple/yellow part does not. I took more than one shot that night and this photo is the only one that has this anomaly in it.

If anyone knows what caused it (I'm sure it's some kind of optical phenomenon), let me know.

Jupiter and Venus

Last night Jupiter and Venus were pretty close together. I had originally planned to go out and take a photo when they were closer to the horizon, but since the thick dark clouds came in fast I had to put on my 14mm Samyang lens and take a quick photo before they disappeared completely.

Edit: Today we had a clear sky so I went out and got this photo using my 30mm Sigma lens.

Stars twinkle, planets don't

Sirius, Jupiter and Betelgeuse

It's easy to think that all the small dots in the night sky are stars. They aren't of course. There are at least 5 planets that you can easily see with the naked eye. Mercury can be seen with the naked eye, but being so close to the Sun it's usually at dawn or dusk and not at night you can see it. The others are Venus, Earth (duh...), Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. So how can you tell the difference between a star and a planet if you just happen to look up at the night sky? Stars twinkle. Yes the nursery rhyme is true. Twinkle, twinkle little star. Although they aren't exactly small they appear small to us.
The photo above illustrates the difference between stars and planets. Left to right it's Sirius, Jupiter and Betelgeuse. Why I chose to have two stars is because they are different colours so they appear to twinkle differently. Jupiter as you can see does not twinkle at all. So why is that? From what I can guess, and what seems logical to me, is that stars shine light in all wavelengths and Earth's atmosphere lets the different wavelengths through at different speeds so that it appears to twinkle. That would also explain why they twinkle more near the horizon. Planets on the other hand reflects just a few wavelengths of light from our Sun so they always appear to be a solid dot.
Even if I got this right I'm sure there are people out there that can explain it better.
The photos are 10-second exposures taken handheld with my Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i), Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L. At least the stars make really nice artworks that way.

The Orion Nebula

Click to be able to see Venus

Last night was a clear winter night. That means a lot of stars were visible. Also the Moon, Venus and Jupiter were close together in the sky. I was even able to see Venus with my naked eyes during the day because the Moon was so close. It might be hard to see in this photo but Venus is close to the bottom right corner. It was so amazing to actually see one of the planets in the bright blue sky while the sun was still up.

Orion nebula without enhancements

Anyhow, that wasn't what this blog post was going to be about. The Orion nebula. A nebula you can also see with naked eyes (it's the middle "star" in the sword). Although I'm guessing not in daylight. I have seen it through binoculars and telescopes though. I've tried to photograph it through a telescope as well, but since I haven't got a camera adapter it was hard to hold the camera still. To take these photos I used my Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i) and my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM lens.

Orion nebula like I see it through my telescope

I took ten 1-second exposures to reduce the star trails. Then I used an old version of a program called DeepSkyStacker to stack the photos together. I made two different versions of the photo. One almost black and white that looks close to what you see when you look at it with a telescope. And one with some more colour in it.

Orion nebula with colours

Using a 200mm lens on a crop-sensor camera still makes the photo way too big. So I had to crop away most of the photo since there wasn't anything in it that I would use. As you can see in the photos I didn't make the crop in exactly the same place for all three photos and that was mostly because I'm lazy. At least they are the same size.

Astrophotography

One of my biggest interest has always been astronomy. The emptiness of space is fascinating to me. Especially the night sky on a clear night is amazing to look at. The next step then is of course to try and take photos of it.
There are a few ways to do that. You can use a wide angle lens and get whole constellations in the photo. You can use a telephoto lens (for example all photos in this blog post is taken with my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L lens and then I've cropped out a lot of the black surrounding the object I wanted) and get a single object. Or you can use a telescope to get even more magnification.

The moon is always a good place to start when trying to take photos of objects in the night sky. Not only does it change appearance every day, it's easy to see the "oceans" and craters with the naked eye. It's also the brightest object in the night sky.

Further away Venus is really bright. Our closest planet neighbour. It's the second brightest object in the night sky. Sometimes, like in this photo, you can see it in the west after sunset and sometimes you can see it in the east before sunrise. It's breathtaking to imagine that if Venus had had an atmosphere like the one we have here on Earth then there could've been life on Venus. It's almost the same size as Earth too so if there was no life we could've colonized it.

Then we have Jupiter. The massive gas giant. The third brightest object in the night sky. Seen here in a photo with its four largest moons. With my telescope I can actually see some of the bands and the red spot. However I have no equipment to attach my camera to the telescope so I can't take those kinds of photos... yet.

Occasionally the Moon passes close to one of the planets. On one such occasion I was able to take this photo. You can see the Moon in the upper right corner and the small dot in the lower left corner is Jupiter.

Of course it's not just in the night sky that you can see objects in the sky. I took this photo of the sun just minutes before sunset one day when it was a thick fog and cloudy.






I don't have that much chances to take good photos of constellations. Even though I have a wide angle lens I live in a small city. That means the sky is always polluted with light from the street lights and cars and stuff like that. I have a list of constellations that I do want to take photos of. Oh and I would love to take a photo of the Milky Way someday. When I do I'm sure you will see the photos here on this blog.