Blogs at RogerGroom.com

I’m not sure if anyone else had noticed the alignment of bright planets and stars at the moment. In the west just after sunset. Best time for photographing them seems to be around 6:30-7pm. Probably by about 7:05ish Mercury is getting too low.

I first noticed it on Friday night when doing some photography near the Kent Street Weir. I then went for a cycle on Sunday arvo to Lake Leschenaultia to take some more pictures in a more scenic environment (I thought). Little did I know things would turn against me:
1) Clouds started coming in quick near sunset
2) People were using the lake right where I wanted to set up
3) Being a completely different season to when I last photographed astronomy objects from the lake the sun and planets were of course setting in a completely different place! I hadn’t planned on the earth tilting it’s axis.
4) To fit them all in the frame I had to wait for them to set low enough – 6:40ish. But the cloud was coming up from the west at the same time!

... all of which made for difficult framing of the subjects.

So, I don’t think it’s a very nice artistic frame, hence I’ve thrown the text on it of the object names, but it’s interesting to astronomy minded people all the same..

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/planets_at_sunset_25_july_2010

Roger.

I've been spending a little bit of time getting my landscape photography section a little more up to scratch. I now have thumbnail images on the landscape photography page to make it a little nicer (amazing, I know) and have been touching up some images.

A new photograph I have added is of the Queen Street Jetty in South Perth. This jetty is one of the locations I considered to photograph the June 26th partial lunar eclipse from. In preparation for that event I spent an evening the week prior photogrphing various locations including this jetty. This s one of the shots from that shoot.

On the 26th June 2010 there was a partial lunar eclipse and I've managed to grab a few pics of it. My primary aim was to get a wide field sequence of the moon rising and going through the phases of the clips - this picture is now online here. I'm quite pleased with the end result and am now working on the other photographs from the eclipse.

I am pleased to announce that I have an exhibition of my astrophotography coming up, running from the 5th June to 31st July at the Gravity Discovery Centre.

I have been working very hard to make this exhibition something really worth visiting for those in Western Australia. It is rare we are treated to exhibitions of astrophotography, but I for one have always enjoyed the few exhibitions we have had, so I'm keen to make this one good too.

See more details at: http://www.astrophotography.com.au/exhibition.html

... or follow the links from my website.

The exhibition will feature many large canvas prints (1m, 1.2m wide, etc) plus a selection of large framed prints, plus a 6 square metre wall of 200 NGC photographs.

The other night I took a quick (50 minute) snap of the Sombrero Galaxy (Messier 104). The result is quite nice, although I think given more time to process it in more detail I could get a bit more sharpness through the central dust lane. See it here

The other night I got a shot of the Rho Ophiuchi nebula complex, a photograph I'm very happy with due to the nice smooth and vibrant colour.

The William Optics Field flatenner v3 continues to be problematic, distorting stars around the edge of the FOV. However, the fact does remain they are slightly less distorted with the FFv3 in place than without.

Here are a couple of shots of the Blue Moon (second full moon in a calendar month) from tonight, 30th March 2010:

While the name Blue Moon does nto indicate the moon will be blue, these pictures show the moon nicely set amongst a dark blue twilight sky.

Yesterday Perth had a strong storm pass through, causing extensive widespread damage. The sunset whic followed was absolutely spectacular. I have one image uploded so far:

Sunset after the Storm - click here

Doing some work out at the ASWA Tammin site on Saturday just gone I took a pic of the surrounding field with clouds whichI quite like....

Click here to see the pic

Back in October 2009 I took this photograph of Tuc 47 down at the local Astro Camp. Overall I'm quite happy with it. It's a wide field which includes a couple of other clusters.

Back in October I went down to the ASWA Astro Camp (never to be missed) and had two very successful evenings of photography. The image which I most like from those nights is this wide field view of the Fornax Galaxy Cluster:

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/fornax_galaxy_cluster_ngc1365

It's great to finally have such a nice colour image of the cluster. This is exactly the kind of photograph I love taking - Lots of small distant galaxies grouped together with some detail and nice colour.

In August 2009 I was lucky enough to meet a real life NASA Astronaut! Megan McArthur. Read about it here

We had a great night of viewing at the ASWA Tammin Observing Site on Saturday just gone (25th) with a few astrophotographers there snapping away. My equipment was behaving nicely, which was a nice change from the previous night where the RA motor wouldn't behave at all.

My most interesting reslting image from the night of the 25th is of the Veil Nebula, an object I had never really expected I would photograph any time soon, being so low to the north.

I'm quite happy with the result, even though there is distorton causing some trailing of star, and the veil is relatively faint. Just to be able t capture it and with such nice colours, I am happy.

See it here: The Veil Nebula

After a long break from imaging here's my first photograph in a few months, it's of a trio of galaxies in Pavo.. click here for the image

Well I have to admit I've been rather lazy lately when it comes to astronomy. The observatory wasn't used for about 20 days straight! But a friend was keen to piggyback his camera on my telescope last night, and what do you know, that got me taking some more photo's of my own!

It is often surprising and pleasing just how easy it is, and how fruitful the results, simply piggybacking my Canon 350D on my LX200. Having the LX200 permanently set up takes all the fuss out of the night. Plonk the 350D with lens on the back and start imaging. Having learned the right combination of software to use helps too (canon remote shooting software + DSLR Shutter is my pick). 

The night was great fun and we both ended up with good images to show for it.

My effort is of M8 and M20, with quite a wide surrounding star field. I'm really happy with the image! It's great to see the colour in such clarity. The camera was slightly out of focus but oh well, the end result is quite good. See it here.

We had a nice clear night here in Perth last night, with the temperature getting down to a nice 6 degrees. This made for fairly good imaging conditions.

Before leaving my scope going for the night on NGC objects I let it run through 20 exposures of Centaurus A. To my surprise I don't think I have ever taken a serious shot at this galaxy before! Just shows how many there are to photograph that I have't after 8 years!

I'm quite happy with the result on this,NGC5128, it's relatively sharp and shows quite a bit of detail through the "meat" in the hamburger. See it here:

I have a new galaxy image up: M104. It's actually the first time I've given a galaxy (other than the LMC/SMC/Milky Way) any reasonable length of exposure with my Canon 350D. It often surprises me what results these un-modified DSLR's can achieve on galaxies, being too easy to get hung up on the bad results they often give on nebulas.

It was also the first night out with my new Megrez 90 and Field Flattener v3 under dark skies. The Megrez performs quite well, but the Field Flattener is proving a litle troublesom, not correcting the field as much as I would like. On this particular night I got to the point where I just gave up with fiddling and started taking photo's, this being one.

I believe the troubes with the Field Flattener can be solved by correcting the spacing between Flattener optics and the chip in the camera. Something I will have to invest some reasonable time in working out/adjusting.

Processing these shots is taking ages. I have some from the same night of Omege Centauri, M5, M83 and NGC 6121, but it's taking a long time to get them processed!

Here's a link to M104: http://www.rogergroom.com/items/m104_galaxy_200903

I have placed on the Project NGC page a new copy of PDF documents, updated on the 24th March 2009.

The PDF documents are effectively books of hundreds of images of NGC objects, grouped by RA Hour and sequenced by Magnitude. I started producing these books when people wanted a copy of my NGC images and I realised what benefit they could be to amateur astronomers.

The new NGC book (as 2 files) contains 1503 objects, several hundred more than the preivous ones from December.

I have had a somewhat forced pause in my attempt to photograph all NGC objects lately by way of my RoboFocus unit becoming problematic. The RoboFocus is overheating periodoically, on about one in five nights. The RoboFocus is required to operate in the automation such that refocus can occur at regular intervals throughout the night. At the moment the risk of damaging the unit is too high to use it, so activities are currently paused.

It's interesting that having now got my observatory running to a nice level of automation, doing a night of attended photograhy where I would spend say 3 hours out there before closing up the shed and going to bed, seems not worthwhile. It's hard to convince myself to do that when I know that once the RoboFocus (and hence automation) is all running again I will get 8 hours of exposures for 30 minutes of effort. Perhaps proof that I'm becoming even more lazy! Must be old age.

See the latest Project NGC documents here

I spent last night with other ASWA members helping out at a school viewing night. These nights are organised by ASWA upon request from a school or community group, aimed at giving visitors the chance to see through telescopes. The night was a great success with lots of visitors turning and seeing various celestial objects.

With 10 telescopes plus more ASWA helpers there was plenty going on all night.

RSS

Archive

Categories