Tag: p900

In Which I Dance With Wolves (OK Coyotes

I drove about 10KM east out of Ottawa onto an unlit rural road to try for a shot of the space station against a starscape.  The neatest thing was that I could hear a pack of wolves or coyotes in the distance howling and yipping to keep me company.

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I didn’t have my act together and i just caught a couple of frames using the cameras night sky time-lapse setting which shoots at ISO 100 f8 and turns the images into a short video.  I used PIPP to split out the individual frames then rot’n’stack to combine the brightest pixels.  I used the windows photos app to brighten the whole thing.  The streak at the bottom of the first image is the space station clipping the bottom of Cassiopeia. The one on the left in the second one I’m calling a meteor because hey, who knows, maybe it was a meteor!  I didn’t notice it at the time – only after i lightened the photo considerably.

Below is an isolated Cassiopeia that I shot at ISO 6400 1/2 sec f3.5. The camera does a much better job with the lower ISO longer exposure.19-3-30 casseopeia 751

 

Imaging the Space Station!

19-3-28 ISS 19Ok it’s not that impressive but this is, i swear to god, the ISS photographed wednesday night from a schoolyard down the street.  It would have been 500 or so km away travelling 28,000 kph.  the shot was taken hand-held at a bit less than full zoom, 1/2000 sec, ISO 400, f 6.3. I was following settings taken from this site which has some better samples.  There are a bunch more bright passes over the next couple of weeks so i’ll keep trying.

Tonight there’s a less bright pass so i’m going to try a timelapse movie to get some sort of streak effect. I’m going to go a bit east to the edge of ottawa/cumberland to get out of the worst of the local light pollution.

 

Dippered Again

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.
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Venus and Mars are Out Tonight (well, Jupiter really and it was yesterday morning)

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These shots of Jupiter are about equivalent to what i got on my first try. Leftmost two are ISO 100 f8 1/60, the brighter one one is ISO 400, and the last one is ISO 400 but 1/200 sec. In my imagination I can see banding on all of them. Jupiter was quite high in the sky(almost 40 degrees) and seemed clear to the naked eye.

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Venus remains a sh*tshow although the overexposed one is pretty.  The first one is ISO 6400 f8 1/200 sec, the others are ISO 100 f8 1/200, 1/1000, 1/500.  Venus was very bright but low(16 degrees) and starting to get lost in the sun.

Disappointing Dipper

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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.