Astronomy and Photography

… is all that I can say. The whole autumn no single clear night with no Moon! No single deep-sky picture. I am becoming frustrated of this!!!

Do you know now why I haven’t posted anything here since October? It’s pretty obvious I don’t have the stuff to show.

Yesterday a friend of mine noticed me that’s clear outside. I went the the balcony, to check the situation, but saw just the fog. But the satellite images have shown that this might be just in valleys… So I decided to check the situation on Bohor.

The decision turned to be pretty good. While driving up the hill, I passed the cloud cover. If only there hadn’t been the Moon on the sky, I would have excellent night, but so I ended just with observing some the most bright DSOs in the winter sky with 10×50 bino and a ‘moonwalk’ Before I packed up I took these two pictures:

This month I have started studying physics in Ljubjana. I really enjoyed this first week, the courses are great and interesting, schoolmates are OK, we have a lot of fun with my friends from MART I am living with. In fact my studying program is astrophysics, but the first year there is no real difference between astrophysics and physics, more interesting courses follow next years.

Because I am in Ljubljana most of the time now, I have decided to take my telescope with me, so I will be able to go to some pretty dark places near Vrhnika at the night, capturing the sky. I haven’t shown the picture I have made about two weeks ago of Pelican nebula, so I am attaching it now to this post. I really like it, it is made from my backyard, but turned to be pretty good, despite of light pollution, because I used the light pollution filter. The long exposition adds more details in faint parts as well (total exposition of 4.2h):

Pelican nebula (IC 5070) in Cygnus @ 50x5min, ISO800, RAW

Enjoy! I hope that there will be some clear night, as moon is leaving the night sky this week

I will post some deep-sky astrophotos from archive, because I haven’t shown them yet on previous blog or on my astrophotography gallery. Milky Way from MART 2009 is today on the list

I participate in MART (Mladinski astronomski raziskovalni tabor or Youth Astronomy Research Camp – translated) every year since 2005. I admit that I am lazy and I never choose any difficult project. DSO imaging works OK for me. Last year I was a mentor for Astrophotography group, but this year I was planning to take small APO telescope from our Astronomy Association, but ended without the scope and telephoto lens Canon 70-200 (wich is still broken). So I have decided to continue mosaic of Milky Way from MART 2007. While capturing I have been using IDAS LPS P-2 light pollution filter, so after processing I have realized that the structures in the Milky Way from 2007 and this year differ too much, as the consequence of using the filter. So I have ended up with mosaic just from this year – 4 frames, from Aquila to Sagittarius.

Each frame consist of 12 exposures of 5 min, taken with modified Canon 350D with IDAS LPS P-2 filter and Canon EF 50mm F/1.8 lens at F/6.3. Image was processed in Iris and Photoshop.