Night Sky - David Mathre Photography

Saturday (10-August-2019) — New Jersey

Backyard Summertime Night Sky Over New Jersey.

The weather forecast indicated the night sky would be relatively clear for a couple of nights. I hope to capture some of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. The moon would be out for part of each night, so not ideal conditions. But I figured I would try. I set up a Nikon D810a camera with a 8-15 mm fisheye lens (ISO 800, 12 mm, f/4, 8 sec) to capture images all night (2550 images in total). It takes a lot of time to process all of the images for a Time-lapse video, and several Star Trail images. Lots of Jet Trails. How many Meteor Trails do you see? The Time-lapse Video is best viewed in a dark room.

Click on the above image to access the individual images in the slide show.

Daily Electric Energy Used (61.8 kWh) from Sense and Daily Solar Electric Energy Produced (73.43 kWh) from SolSystems and Locus Energy. I needed to clean the oven, and cooked dinner in the oven adding 3.7 kWh to the total used. Daily net surplus 11.6 kWh.

Current Weather Conditions

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Saturday (17-November-2018) — New Jersey

Backyard Autumn Nighttime Sky Over New Jersey.

Earlier in the evening it didn’t look promising for a clear sky. I checked again after midnight, and did see Orion and some other stars. I set up two cameras same as the previous clear nights to take images for star trails, and if lucky catch a launch of a rocket from Virginia at 04:01. Unfortunately, I only got 15 minutes of clear skies before the clouds rolled back in. I did check again at 04:00 for 5 minutes, but it was still overcast and I didn’t see the launch.

alt_title. (David J Mathre) — Star Trails (00:45-00:59). Composite of images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 19mm f/4 PC-E lens (ISO 200, 19 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec). Raw images processed with Capture One Pro and the composite generated with Photoshop CC (statistics, maximum). (David J Mathre)

Sunday (11-November-2018) — New Jersey

Backyard Autumn Nighttime Sky Over New Jersey.

Second night in a row 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

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 (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?).

Star Trails looking South (19:25-03:15). Composite of images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 19 mm f/4 PC-E lens (ISO 200, 19 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec). Raw images processed with Capture One Pro and Photoshop CC (scripts, statistics, maximum). (David J Mathre)

Star Trails looking Up (19:28-02:29). Composite of images taken with a Nikon D850 camera and 8-15 mm fisheye lens (ISO 800, 10 mm, f/5.6, 30 sec) (David J Mathre)

Individual images from the slideshow can be viewed here.