The Stars and The Moon

[mick123]

hehehe, Lady, FT answered on my behalf jor

[mick123]

FT, your bird seemed to have taken a sharp turn abruptly

[FineTuned]

10 days ago, I suffered a terminal hard disk crash and practically lost all my working stuff on the Venus Transit. That's about 700 Gb total data gone in a flash, about 6 Gb of which was on the Transit itself. I'm in serious depression now.

However, I did upload one bit of work-in-progress (very raw material here) to photobucket :-


This is the final moments of the transit.....again, sorry for the largish file size.

[mick123]

this is very nice..............

so much so for advancement of technology but murphy's law still is murphy's law. reminds me to double back up my stuff too.

[lady-o-leisure]

OWWWW!!! That is terrible!!! Aiyo! well thank goodness you managed to get a tiny bit of it done and loaded, but that doesnt seem like such a small bit tho. Nice compilation, FT. If i show the Astronomy club here , your pics.. they will surely be impressed too.

[FineTuned]

That hard disk crash was a shocker....it was a new unit I bought less than a year ago to transfer some of my sorted collection of precious memories to for safe keeping. When Murphy's law strikes, it strikes hard!

Luckily, I hadn't wiped the original captures of the transit from my camera SD yet. But there were thousands of frames partially sorted out on that hard disk (talk about eye strain!) and I don't think I have the energy to go through the process again.....

Okay, a bit of more cheery news. Mick, you may have missed the Venus Transit, but there's something similar (and more challenging) coming up:

It's the Mercury Transit. I took that pic from USJ on the morning of 9th November 2006. Mercury is that miserable tiny dot at the top, the bottom thingy is a massive sunspot.

Next transit will be in 9th May 2016. The challenge? It will not be visible from Subang Jaya . So you'll have to get on that space craft again to find a better viewing location. Lady will get to see it almost from start to finish, though.

Plenty of time to prepare. Wonder what specs our digital cameras and lenses will have in 4 year's time! 100 megapixels and optical zoom range 4mm - 2,000mm (35mm equivalent).

[mick123]

ok i'm starting to plan a holiday trip to CA.

[lady-o-leisure]

ok i'm starting to plan a holiday trip to CA.

Woohoooo! Mari mari! Weather will be good in May, plenty of flowers all in bloom too.

[RolyPoly]

Finetuned, thanks for sharing the Venus Transit photos. It's nice to view them in the flash format you posted than going through photo by photo. Thumbs up!

Sorry to hear about the hardisk crash incident. I understand how terrible you must be feeling. Just losing all my photos taken in 2010 already made me feel terribly sad. I can't imagine losing all the photos in a hardisk.

[lady-o-leisure]

Last night hubby and i attended the Astronomers' club Star-b-q gathering. Was sooo informative and i learned quite a bit. Now i feel a tiny bit less blur. hahah

I had some opportunity to take photos while trying my best not to let the LCD screen annoy all the stargazers. They seriously do NOT like any light around there. The homeowner has 20acres of land and barely any light pollution around there. Me being Rabun Ayam, cant see squat in the dark and fiddling about with the camera settings, hoping to get it right.
This is a pic of 3 stitched photos, each photo being a 2min exposure, held manually coz i dont hv a remote control for my camera.

[FineTuned]

OMG, That most wondrous view (which we never will see in the Klang Valley in a Zillion years ) Our home Galaxy!

Lady, how you managed to hold still for a total of 6 mins (and likely more as you must have tried other shots) with your finger on the snap button without shaking the camera is a miracle - or you must have muscles of frozen steel.

Okay, now you know...DSLR astrophotographers are never without that all important wireless remote! And a piece of clear red plastic to be taped over the display.

[mick123]

wow L-OL. we don't get this orientation here i'm still too lazy to go hunt for milky way since that cloudy night

i think your exposure of 2 minutes is too long resulting in trails. try the 600 rule, largest aperture and highest iso possible

[lady-o-leisure]

Mick.. totally agree with you. Am so not thrilled with the quality but after trying higher ISO and shorter exposure of about 50secs or 60 secs.. terrible. MY cam is sooooo nasty at ISO800, u cant imagine it. I had it on f/2.8 for all the pics. When u come here.. i will take u out to where u can see all that. Even my area is not so clear like that. Sifu Mick.. really wished u were here to give me tips and pointers.

FT... I had the cam on my new tripod which worked wonders coz unlike my older tripod, this one really keeps still. So all i had to do was pray that my finger wasnt moving too much. I am really not prepared for such night-time photography. I didnt even think about taking pics of the sky actually. Only later when it got dark and i saw the amazing sky, i said to Hubby.. i need the camera. So off we went back to the car which is a distance away, and got it out. Some more walking in the complete darkness was really scary for me considering i saw all the snake, gopher and rabbit holes everywhere in the daylight. I am hoping to upgrade my cam, once i sell off my bike and also hubby's Harley. heheh.. then we will be getting a telescope too. Thinking of getting a 9 1/4 inch Prices hv been dropping a bit lately. We were advised to get a CCD cam for it. That one costs too much tho. Any opinion on the new Canon 60Da? I asked the guys last night but they dont hv any experience with the 60Da yet. Some are using CCDs. Some of the guys were doing imaging last night .. hooked up with all kinds of equipment. Wah.. serious stuff oh!
Thanks for the tip on using red filter on the LCD. No wonder they used tiny red lights to do whatever they needed. I shall keep that in mind.

[FineTuned]

I think you still can't get away from using a remote, even if your tripod is rock steady. Very minute random movements on the camera (albeit with a wide angle lens) will cause your pin point stars to bloat with long exposure..... The effect is like getting soft focus or the resultant picture looks out of focus with fat stars. It's better to set your time to the slowest shutter speed available (this is usually around 30 secs on most DSLRs AFAIK) rather than finger pressing to hold on bulb, and also use the delay timer to allow all camera vibrations to dampen down before taking the shot.

If you go for the CPC 925 (it is an outstanding telescope), you may as well go for a proper imager (aka CCD camera) and forget about using a DSLR. It's a different level of astrophotograpy and will leave conventional DSLR based astrophotography gasping in the dust....especially when you start shooting nebulae and those distant galaxies.

I did go a bit crazy over the 60Da when I first heard about it. But now the feeling has grown that it's too limited for astrophotography.....basically, it's heavy, and has no proper cooling (meaning it will suffer more noise during those mandatory long exposure shots). I'd stick to a standard 60D, (maybe go for the new 650D) for the occasional wide field astrophotography piggy-backed on a tracking telescope. Use an imager for serious stuff. Currently eyeing the Nightscape. Can dream on....

[kwchang]

L-O-L, I always wondered if we can really take pics of the Milky Way... and you did it. Tell me, can you also see it with your eyes? or is it only possible with long exposures?