Sometimes being a bit out of focus can be a good thing… I was watching Wonders of the Solar System when Annie the cat jumped up on the entertainment center; she likes to sit right in front of the TV and watch the action. In this case, Annie was watching program host Prof. Brian Cox. I was amused by the sight of the cat staring up into the professor’s face and tried an iPad photo of the scene. The iPad had a bit of trouble focussing, the scene changed, and I got a mystic, unworldly, artsy shot instead of a funny picture!
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The Waxing Gibbous Moon
The sky was beautiful tonight with the Moon, planets, and stars shining brightly. Continuing my experiments with telephoto astrophotography, tonight I attached my Canon 2X III Adapter to my 400mm lens, and EOS 7D Mark II body; the combination gives approximately 1,200mm of telephoto goodness! At that focal length camera vibration becomes a real issue if the system isn’t attached to a very heavy tripod. My tripod isn’t heavy. But the Moon was bright and with ISO 800 and a shutter speed of 1/400 I got decent, though not vividly sharp results. Next milestone will be to mount the camera and telephoto to the telescope’s heavy tripod and motorized mount. Why not use the telescope directly? Well, that works pretty well, but the optics of my telephoto lens are actually superior in quality to those in my telescope!
American Bullfrog – Lithobates catesbeianus
Saturday, April 18 presented us with beautiful spring weather so we took off to see how the gardens, ponds, and woodlands at the Holden Arboretum were doing. Some garden paths remained closed for the season but we happily set off for higher ground and pools.
Dragonfly In Flight
Bird songs filled the air as we enjoyed early blooms and emerging animals including: a water snake warming itself on a tree branch, clusters of turtles also catching some sun, a couple of bullfrogs, and three ( 3 ) dragonflies! We will visit there again, likely in May when sustained warmth entices more life into view.
Sun Worshiping Turtles
ISS: From Perseus to Darkness
That’s no meteor! It’s a partial trace of the trail the International Space Station took tonight as it traveled upward, through constellation Perseus, and faded into Earth’s shadow. The exposure, and thus the trace, was shortened to avoid overexposure due to heavy light pollution in the Cleveland (Ohio) area.
Woman Moves In for a Close-Up using her Smartphone’s Camera
Visitors were amazed as they watched a large snapping turtle slowly make its way across the paved path at the Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve on Lake Erie. The turtle was likely a female on an egg-laying mission. The reptile, watched by several people every step of her way, eventually made it across the path, and into some low brush before tumbling, end-over-end, into an area of shallow water below. Shown here, an unidentified woman moves in for a close-up using her smartphone’s camera. I used a 200mm lens.
Crossing the Road
Hyades-Venus-Pleiades Together
April 11 presented a rare clear night just in time to see Venus draw very close to the Pleiades star cluster; nights lately have been cloudy and wet! Timing also put the Hyades cluster within the same camera field-of-view as Venus nightly progresses higher in the sky, relative to the stars. As the grouping sank into the trees to my west, I made several single-exposure images of the sight. This one using Canon EOS 7D Mark II: ISO 2000, f/5.6, 1.6 sec., 70mm, at 9:58 EDT.
Sky Dancer
This breezy day, a Great Blue Heron approached its nest. Spreading its broad wings, the bird caught the air, hovered, and floated gently to a treetop landing – graceful as a dancer in the sky!
In Flight
The Moon: Mare Serenitatis (left) and Mare Iridium (right)
I can’t say as I blame them, the people who didn’t show for our observatory open night Saturday. After all, the temperature was about 19 degrees (F), damned cold! But the sky was clear and the waxing Moon was high in the sky. Both Moon and Jupiter were sharing constellation Cancer with The Beehive star cluster (M44). Still, those sensible people who stayed home and warm missed a glorious view of old Luna, especially half-lit Mare Iridium — the Sea of Rainbows. In my idle time waiting for visitors, I tried out a little afocal astrophotography using the observatory’s 9-inch Warner and Swasey telescope (ca. 1901) and my little Samsung Galaxy Camera 2 all-in-one. Most shots were a little shy of sharp, and all had some degree of chromatic aberration, and all had a big chunk of image missing where our century-old star diagonal is missing a bit of glass. One shot, however, did work out well, especially after a little fix-up including conversion to monochrome to eliminate color fringing. Not long after our seven brave visitors left, I caught sight of the indistinct reappearance of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and that was it… time to close up and go home. My toes needed to be thawed.
Moon, Venus, City Lights
I was disappointed with my previous efforts at recording an earlier close passage of our Moon and Venus. The Moon’s orbit, however, gave me a second chance on a night when the sky was pretty clear. Pretty cold, too, at an unseasonable 23F.
Moon and Venus in Twilight
But I braved the temperatures and, using two different Canon camera bodies, got shots of the combo first in twilight, later in a dark sky. Well, the sky here isn’t really all that dark, but it was pretty good.
Crescent Moon
Some shots I exposed to get some detail in the lighted portion of the thin, waxing crescent Moon; others I exposed to record the Earthshine portion of Luna’s disk. The late shots I took from a vantage point that overlooked the lights of a nearby city whose glow put power lines and their towers into silhouette.
Crescent Moon and Stars
All-in-all, I’m pleased with the night’s efforts. Especially now that my fingers aren’t red from the cold air!
Test Subject Annie
Working on the Canon EOS 7D Mark II autofocus system settings last evening, I sought out a willing model. Annie, our huge gray domestic shorthair cat, poses beautifully … until you point a camera at her. Once she sees a big camera lens or even an iPad pointed at her, Annie starts acting like a supermodel hopped up on caffeine: she rolls around, stretches her legs, grabs at the camera, and in general just gets crazy with it! During our brief session Annie did a bit of rolling but, having been stirred from contemplating the view from a nearby window, she was a bit mellow. The kitty rolled half over, curled up in a big furry ball — all legs and tail — and moved slowly through several head positions. I got a good test subject for my new camera settings and some decent photos of our feline beauty. Oh, and I think I finally got the settings I was looking for.
PhotonStopper 