David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sun, moon, and stars
Into the Vortex. Early Morning Backyard Star Trails (and one meteor trail). Composite of 300 images taken with a Nikon D3x camera and 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens (ISO 100, 14 mm, f/4, 59 sec) over a 5 hour period combined using startrails.exe.
Sunset Panorama View of the Moon, Night Sky, Oakland and San Francisco from the Berkeley Hills. Composite of three images taken with a Nikon D3x camera and 24 mm f/3.5 PC-E lens (ISO 800, 24 mm, f/5, 0.5 sec).
Last night the sky was clear, and the waxing gibbous moon (61%) bright, so I set up a couple of cameras with big lenses out on the deck. One of the systems (Nikon D4 camera TC-E III 20 teleconverter and 600 mm f/4 VR lens (ISO 400, 1200 mm, f/8, 1/60 sec)) was set to record video (1080p, 30 fps). While reviewing the videos I noticed one with something (a bird?) passing in front of the moon. Played back at 10 fps shows the transit to occur over 25 frames.
Sunset on the Baltic Sea. Are there offshore oil platforms in the Baltic Sea off Denmark? Image taken with a Nikon 1 V2 camera FT1 adapter and 80-400 mm VRII lens (ISO 400, 400 mm, f/5.6, 1/500 sec).
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 took a set of 99 images that I made into this time-lapsed video (Nikon D4 camera, 28 mm f/1.8 lens (ISO 200, 28 mm, f/1.8, 1 sec)).