Backyard Autumn Nighttime Sky Over New Jersey.
The sky was clear, so I set up two cameras to record the night sky (and hope to see some meteors).
Individual images in the slideshow can be viewed here.
Saturday (10-November-2018) — New Jersey
Category: Astronomy
Views of the sun, moon, and stars
Saturday (03-November-2018) — New Jersey
Backyard Nighttime Sky Over New Jersey.
The sky looked relatively clear again, so I put two cameras out to record the night sky. This time I remembered to set the ISO on the D850 camera correctly. I managed to see a couple of small meteor trails (Taurids?).
Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.
Tuesday (30-October-2018) — New Jersey
Autumn Night Sky Over New Jersey.
This was the night with a clear sky for a long time. I set up two cameras to record the nighttime sky for composite Star Trail images. The first a Nikon D810a camera with 19 mm f/4 PC-E lens looking west. I like this camera for nighttime sky photography because it can be set to take images longer than 30 seconds (up to 900 seconds). The second a Nikon D850 camera with a 8-15 mm fisheye lens looking up from my patio. I forgot to reset the ISO for the Nikon D850 camera from 100 to 800. When I looked at the images, they were all black — but since the raw for this camera have an amazing dynamic range, I was able to increase the brightness by 4 stops during post-processing and get decent images…
Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.
Saturday (13-October-2018) — New Jersey to Portugal
Gone to See Portugal. Street Photography Workshop with Steve Simon. Day -1: Travel to Portugal.
I took a red-eye flight from Newark to Lisbon on TAP (Portugal Airlines). The “fast track” pre-boarding security lines at Newark terminal B were not open, so I had to remove my shoes, put each computer, notepad, and phone in separate trays. I also had to remove all the cameras from my camera bag. This is the third time this year that the “fast track” lanes at Newark were not staffed. TAP uses the SAS lounge in Newark. Good Nordic snacks before the flight. The TAP flight left a bit after the scheduled departure time, but still arrived in Lisbon almost an hour before the scheduled arrival time. The dinner served by TAP was excellent. The only time I have had airline food this good before was while traveling Upper Class on Virgin Atlantic (back in the days I was commuting to Cambridge, UK while working on a chemical automation project). After dinner, and most passengers fell asleep the cabin was dark enough that I could see the Big Dipper through my window. I was able to get a picture of the Big Dipper using a Fuji X-T3 camera and 35 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 3200, 35 mm, f/1.4, 1 sec). I held the camera up to the window for the long exposure. Manually focusing to infinity and holding the camera still for 1 second was a challenge.
Individual images in the slideshow can be viewed here.
Saturday (29-September-2018) — New Jersey
Autumn Backyard Night Sky Over New Jersey.
This was the second night in a row that we had clear skies, so I set up a Nikon D810a camera with a 8-15 mm fisheye lens (ISO 200, 9 mm, f/8, 120 sec) to record the night sky. I still have an issue with condensation on the big lens. I may need to rig up a tape heater for the lens. The other thing I am seeing with a very wide-angle (9 mm) lens, and a relatively high-resolution sensor (35 megapixel) is the size of the star images is very small. I think I got better star trail images when I was using 12-16 megapixel sensors). The next clear night, I plan to set up a side-by-side comparison.
Individual images in the slideshow can be viewed here.