Sharper Moon

 So in the session on the 18th of this month (October 2024), I shot about half a dozen moon images. And something occurred to me today when I was perusing them ... the fact that every shot is unique when shooting an object that is small and a quarter million miles away (ish). 

The reasons for this include:

• seeing -- at any given moment, there is turbulence in the atmosphere that very slightly distorts portions of the image ... shooting multiple copies of the same image can give you options to choose from that are very slightly sharper, and this is that image ...
• shutter shock -- depending on the camera, the shutter itself can vibrate a bit, and create a tiny fraction of shake ... this is not all that common when shooting the moon since it is very bright, but we're talking tiny amounts that only show up at magnification ...
• vibration -- your tripod will always vibrate a wee bit ... such things as wind, a clunky shutter, not using the timer to release the shutter, and so on ...
• focus -- tiny variations in focus can affect sharpness ... always best to manually focus and switch off AF so the camera does not choose to change it

So I was looking at the other moon shots I took during this session (only a few actually) and found that there was one that stood out just a bit. It just seemed really sharp. So I performed as subtle a processing session as I could and found that this copy of the moon feels much sharper with less sharpening. I like it a lot, especially the top and top right edges. The detail there feels really real as opposed to heavily sharpened.

Anyway ... enjoy ...

Moon
Panasonic G9
Panasonic Leica 100-400
1/500s @f/7.1
ISO200

Colorful Comet (not so deep fake)

 I decided to try some of the kinkier features in Luminar Neo and ended up playing with one of its many color enhancing modes. I can't quite remember what combination of panels led me here, but I quite like this wild version of the comet.

Monochrome Moon

I decided to try processing the moon as monochrome in Luminar Neo and was quite pleased with the result. Cropped fairly close in size to yesterday's color version ...

 

I have to admin that monochrome looks better in many ways and in this case the details are cleaner in my opinion.

A little kick in the Astrophotography ... or Comet fever as it were ...

 I really tried hard to find the comet that appears every 80,000 years or so ... it's name veritably rolling off the tongue ... C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) -- which I am taking from Stellarium, a superb application that everyone should have on their phone. Stellarium even shows the location of the Starlink satellites in real time, which is a bit of a hoot.

Anyway, so last Wednesday I tried to find the comet and it was a dismal failure. No matter how I tried locating it, I just could not get it. And then my battery ran out on the G9. Grrr. Further comedy ensued when I went home and decided to give the Nikon D7200 a try as an optical viewfinder has a better chance of showing the comet under magnification. And after a frustrating search for the battery chargers (5 flat batteries!) I gave up as they must have gone into storage during our ongoing basement disaster.

So ... I charged several G9 batteries instead and gave it another try Thursday evening. I got the compass in the phone squared away and using Stellarium I was pretty sure I was in the right area, but I was only a bit out of the city and so had to contend with some lights and glow.

After a short stint of randomly shooting to see if I had found it, I decided to use my brain and shoot each part of the sky at moderate magnification (200mm equivalent). I had brought my precision mount on the tripod, so all I needed to do was to search methodically until I saw the comet in an image. Easy peasy, right?

Well, actually, it was :-) ... I found the comet after less than 10 shots. And I was completely blown away as the head and tail were crystal clear. I plan to try to stack the images I shot, but this is just one image processed lightly and cropped. It is noisy and the contrast is not great, but the comet is clearly visible and that is cool to me.

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)

Panasonic G9, Pana-Leica 100-400 (gen1), 400mm, f/6.3, 2s, ISO 3200, RAW

Ok, that's not great ... but I am hoping that stacking the images will do better. We'll see.

So that was fun, and last night I got the itch to shoot Jupiter as it was just hanging there in the sky. I went out back onto the deck and sat down for a fun session. 

Unfortunately, I dislike all the images I got (the moons are clearly visible, but the exposure sucks), so I shot the moon as well and was very pleased with how that turned out. 

I used Luminar Neo, the editor I purchased to free myself from the Adobe subscription (>300 per year, every year) and am learning how to process a little better every day. 

Moon (duh)

Panasonic G9, Pana-Leica 100-400 (gen1), 400mm, f/7.1, 1/800s, ISO 200, RAW

I was surprised at how clean and sharp the image is and how well I was able to bring out the inherent color of the various lunar maria (which are defined as: large, dark, basaltic plains on Earth's Moon, formed by lava flowing into ancient impact basins). It is a beautiful object to shoot and process, that is certain.

Now to try again to get something useful from shooting Jupiter. The real astrophotographers out there are getting images these days that look as good as or better than my moon shot above ... but that takes a serious investment in time and money and I admit to having insufficient patience. Alas, I did find it rewarding to capture the comet and I will try to make time to get a cleaner image of it by stacking. If I achieve that, I will post here on the blog.

I just unpublished this because I forgot to add this cool image of a Starlink going by ...

Note that the exposure here was too long and so the satellite is smeared across a lot of sky, but I was able to go into Stellarium to confirm that this really is a Starlink ... as shown below.

I think that's pretty cool :-)

The Comet Is Visible! Closest approach TODAY, 12 October 2024!

Here we go again ...

Our provincial government appears to be neglecting their duty to the people to maintain safe and effective health care monitoring ... the cancelling of waste water monitoring being an egregious example.

This article is particularly scary in that it signals a rise in many infectious diseases that can set us back 40 years or more if not gotten under control.

Do we really think that a Premier that is obsessed with making his mark by transferring billions in alcohol revenue to the Oligarchy is reelectable? Is that in our best interests? 

Images of the Total Eclipse on April 8, 2024

I work in software development as I have pretty much all of my adult life. The startup I work for has very flexible policies towards life events, and of course a total eclipse is a major life event. I photographed the eclipse in 1979 when I was still living in Winnipeg (for another 4 months), and this is the first total eclipse I have experienced since then ... a breathtaking 45 years later.

I am not quite dedicated enough to drive hundreds of miles to escape the whispy cloud cover that was predicted, nor to get on the path of actual totality (Ottawa maxed out at 99%). Four or five hours of driving would have netted me the classic images that are associated with totality, but I just can't generate that kind of energy any more lol.

However, I was quite willing to buy a 72mm ND400 filter for my m4/3 Pana Leica 100-400 f4-f6.3 zoom lens and shoot that on my Panasonic G9 Mark 1 on a carbon fiber tripod as you can see here ...

What you cannot see from that image is my fancy Manfrotto 410 Junior Geared Head (a new one shown below while mine was bought used and rather worn out -- but for 25% of the new price who can complain) does not have sufficient travel to find the sun as it had the temerity to be directly overhead.

This was a huge problem that I found I could solve only by having the camera and tripod essentially in my lap with one foot under the front leg. Not the most comfortable of positions, but it certainly had no bearing on clarity since the shutter speed was very high for the entire shoot.

Now, the day before was a Sunday, so I went outside in beautiful clear skies (grrr) at about the same time as the eclipse was set to begin and shot a few test images. It took a while to get comfortable with the Neewer ND400 variable neutral density filter, but I eventually got the hang of it and was quite pleased with the result. It was shot at the equivalent of 800mm at f22 I believe. That's a pretty high diffraction aperture, but the result is quite adequate as far as I am concerned.

If you look closely, you can see two sunpots near the top and midway. There is a much fainter spot towards the bottom but at this size it will not really be apparent. I verified that these were sunspots by googling for sun images and found ones with sunspots that look exactly like these. So I am astronomer guy for a day lol.

And then the day arrived ... well, it was only the next day so no great anticipation. I worked starting earlyish in the morning and when my alarm went off, out I went. The whispy cloud was actually less intense most of the time than what you saw in the first image above. And at ND400, the sun pretty much overwhelms the faint cloud cover. However, I did have some trouble getting in focus images at first, so I fiddled with the AF system until I was reliably hitting focus each time. Modern mirrorless cameras have a lot of focus modes :-)

Note: It took me until the sun was a sliver and the AF could no longer reliably hit to finally realize that all I ever had to do was get the sun in focus once and then switch off the AF at the lens. DUH! Considering the distance, there can be no variation at all once the lens is focused at infinity.

The first shot that really looked good was already something like a 10% bite out of the sun. The moon is travelling on an apparent tragectory of perhaps -20 degrees from vertical through the sun and only a hair off-center as you will see. That's a wild-assed guess by the way, so don't hold me to it. These were all shot at ISO 100 with aperture between F14 and F22 and at shutter speeds of 1/8000s, dropping as the sun darkens.

And so I reveal my number one sun. (Well this would actually be my number 2 (hyuk hyuk) sun since I am displaying my first ever sun above.)

Impatient me shot the next one only minutes later. If you stare at it for a bit you will notice that the moon has travelled a few percent further along. But you will also note that the exposure and/or processing improved the sunspots immensely.

I tried spacing them out from here so there was a least *some* noticeable difference :-) ... so let's see how I did.

And the moon finally gets the first of its prey ... the big sunspot in the middle of the sun is no more. Goodbye sweet sunspot, we shall mourn you for almost an hour ...

Had to skip the next one in sequence as it had a tragic auto focus accident ... as in it wouldn't. Again ... DUH! This leaves a bit of a jump to a smaller slice remaining than your eyes might expect.

And here begins the tilt ... it starts subtley, but that quickly changes (for you ... it slowly changed for me 😜) ...

You will have noticed by now, and it is even more obvious as you go forward that a sliver of the sun appears to be rotating around the moon. It would be very cool to see it happen as a video ... and maybe I will do that at some point ... But this is an illusion of course ... the moon is just passing the sun a very short distance offset from center to the southwest from our point of view -- as in, at this specific latitude and longitude. Others are having a different experience.

So the crescent that remains as the moon passes image by image through the sun is about 1% that is off-center and shifting bit by bit to the right and down.

And we arrive at the final image in the sequence. The exposure was increased somewhat aggressively when the sun was a tiny sliver as things got pretty dark around the yard. So when I realized that the sequence was reversing and quite a bit of the sun was exposed, I hurredly grabbed an image before packing it in. And of course I blew out the exposure something fierce 😜

I worked on it in Lightroom for quite a while and this is the compromise I arrived at. No Da Vinci here, but a serviceable image to prove that the world did not end at peak eclipseyness.

I hope you enjoyed these images as much as I did while shooting them and perhaps a lot more than when I was processing them. What a fabulous event that was ... uniting huge parts of the world (along a very narrow path 😜) in the quest to watch the two most important celestial bodies duke it out for our attention. I think the sun won in the end, but it was a close thing there for a moment.