David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sun, moon, and stars
Backyard Autumn Night Sky — Star and Jet Trails
View looking south from my backyard. Composite of 120 images taken from 20:00 to 23:59 with a Nikon D4 camera and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 100, 24 mm, f/5.6, 120 sec). Raw images processed with Capture One Pro. Star trails composite processed using Photoshop CC (scripts, statistics, maximum).
Backyard Autumn Night Sky in New Jersey
Star and jet trails looking south from my backyard. Composite of 40 images taken with a Nikon D810a camera and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 800, 24 mm, f/4, 120 sec) and processed using Capture One Pro and Photoshop CC (statistics, maximum).
Happy Eclipse Day! Some home renovation issues kept me in New Jersey for the eclipse. I set up a Nikon D810a camera with 45 mm f/2.8 lens and a 20 stop neutral density filter to take images every 4 minutes from just before the eclipse started. Unfortunately, clouds moved in just before the maximum (~78% coverage). The sun and moon reappeared shortly thereafter. The following image is a composite over the 160 minute period of the eclipse. The eclipse also reduced the amount of electricity produced by my solar panels. The two graphs show the hourly production of electricity for the day before the eclipse and during the eclipse. You can see a significant drop when the moon was blocking the sun. My brother Hans was in Tennessee with his family to observe the total eclipse. He sent me an image that he took with a Nikon D3 camera and a 200-400 mm f/4 lens and TC-E II 2.0 teleconverter at totality.
Late night or early in the morning (hard to tell this far north when there isn’t much darkness at night) I looked out my cabin window on the MV Explorer and saw the electric blue Noctilucent clouds. I read about them before (http://www.spaceweather.com/), but had never seen them. The clouds are ice crystals that are very high that you can only see for a short time when the sun is below the horizon. One theory is the crystals are nucleated when micro-meteors pass through the upper atmosphere. We were in the Baltic Sea traveling from Stockholm to Copenhagen and the sun doesn’t set until very late I set up a camera in my cabin and and started taking pictures.(Nikon D4 camera, 28 mm f/1.8 lens (ISO 200 or 800, 28 mm, f/1.8, 1 sec)).
I got up really early this morning to set a camera up to try and catch a NASA launch from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The sounding rocket was supposed to release some chemicals to form artificial clouds that would glow blue, green, and red. Unfortunately, the launch was scrubbed due to high altitude clouds. Mission Update Five-years ago I caught a previous launch from the Wallops Flight Facility. I did get enough images for a composite star-trails image. Later in the morning I took my lonely Leica T camera out to check out the new wildflowers in my backyard.
