Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
All you can eat oysters
Strada Cucina paid a visit to the MUSC horseshoe today, so I tried out one of their sammiches.
The porchetta is thick slices of pork shoulder, rapini (broccoli-rabe) and provolone between a crusty baguette. Really good.
One of my favourite podcasts to listen to is Astronomy Cast. I’ve even had the fortune to see the recording of some episodes at Dragon*Con and in a Google+ hangout.
After my recent experiments with photographing the night sky I noticed the two most recent Astronomy Cast episodes were about astrophotography.
Being an astro geek in a former life, astrophotography has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now. I also know it can be an expensive hobby.
Astronomy Cast Episode 239 talks about the gear needed: camera, lenses and tripod. Good discussion on the kinds of equipment needed, plus some very useful links in the show notes. They even talk about using webcams attached to telescopes.
Episode 240 discusses astrophotography techniques. Exposure settings, image stacking, a little bit about detector characteristics, filters.
Good info in both episodes. Next episode is supposed to cover image processing.
An attempt to capture a 60 minute exposure of the northern sky failed because the battery died on me during the exposure. I should probably switch out to a fresh battery before each session.
After switching to the spare battery and letting the camera warm up a little bit, I captured this ~33 minute exposure (ISO 400, f/7.1) showing the stars circling around Polaris.
This one is another ~33 minute exposure with the aperture set to f/10. Makes the sky a little darker but the lower magnitude stars start disappearing. Now the camera’s been out long enough for condensation to become a problem again
Going to have to research some solutions for getting around the condensation issue. Had someone suggest a small battery powered fan which seems like a good idea.
The next technique I want to try is stacking multiple short exposures to produce a simulated long exposure. It’s supposed to be a good technique for controlling the amount of noise in the images.
I left the camera sitting outside pointed north-ish for some long exposures last night.
This one was a 17.4 minute exposure, ISO 800, f/7.1 with the camera noise reduction turned on.
This one was a 30 miinute exposure, ISO 800, f/13 with the camera noise reduction turned off.
I tried a 60 minute exposure, but that one didn’t turn out because of condensation on the lens filter.