Photos from my fine new camera and my fine old camera
The Space Station has been frequently visible lately but the weather has been sh*tty. This is 4 frames from a “night sky” video on the Nikon P900 so ISO 100, f/2.8, 25 seconds. It was shot with the lens at the 24mm setting but it’s cropped quite a bit.
I briefly convinced myself that I had imaged the pinwheel galaxy near Ursa Major. After a couple of hours hard looking though I realized that I had lost focus and the smudge i was exclaiming over was really an 86 uMa, a magnitude 5.7 star that’s sort of in the right direction from the dipper but not really.
I went back to first principles and plotted a wide angle shot vs what i could see in stellarium then followed my zooming in as I gradually lost the plot.
My problem is that I often can’t see much until I load the images onto the PC and brighten them. So I take a ton of pictures, load them up and scan them and I’m like “ooh, a smudge!”
Oh well, I’ll probably keep trying the pinwheel because it’s always high in the sky but i may have to wait for andromeda to be more visible toward the end of summer.
No wolves last night but I caught the ISS twice just after sunset. First near Cassiopeia then near the big dipper. The space station shows up as a streak because these are long exposures. The Cassiopeia one shows more sky colour because it was nearer the setting sun.
These are both extracted from timelapse/night-sky videos taken by the camera’s scene mode which means they are 25 second exposures at ISO 100 – I’m guessing f2.8 but not completely sure.
The camera has a setting for taking star-trail time lapses. The video shows the stars of the big dipper moving over a couple of hours last night. Off the frame to the left is the north star that everything rotates around. The orangey star rising at the right halfway through is Arcturus.
Interestingly, the camera sets itself to ISO 100 and 25 second exposures where the longest it will let me set is 15 seconds. There’s a second setting for a night sky timelapse which maybe doesn’t smear the stars. I’m going to try that tonight if it’s clear and see if i can stack some of the frames.
below is the closest i could get to the last frame of the video and one of the early frames with just the dipper rotated and cropped.
I find it interesting that, at maximum exposure, the P900 is just a bit better than my 70 year old mark I eyeball. This is ISO 1600, 1 sec, f2.8 and I brightened it as much as i could on the PC. I had tried ISO 6400 1/2 sec with no better result. I guess I imagined there were countless other stars that my eye couldn’t see. The limits of the camera seem to be about the same as my eye – around magnitude 3. The second star from the left is Mizar and you can just see its fainter companion Alcor which, to be fair, my eye cannot.
I also took a series of snaps and combined them with rot’n’stack but no great joy. If the skies are clear again tonight I’ll try a star-trails timelapse.
Astrophotography Newbie 