David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sun, moon, and stars
Moon over Colorado
While driving to Arapaho National Wildlife Refuge on Colorado Highway 14 near Stove Prarie, I saw the moon above the ridgeline. I stopped at a rest area and took this image.
Image taken with a Nikon D2xs and 200-400 mm VR lens (ISO 400, 400 mm, f/11, 1/640 sec).
Jet passing the Moon.
Image taken from my backyard with a Nikon D2xs and 80-400 mm VR lens @ 400 mm (ISO 800, 1/25 sec, f/5.6). Post processed using Capture One Pro 5, Photoshop CS5, Topaz DeNoise 5. Hand-held, a bit out of focus, lots of noise reduction needed, moon blown out.
Night Sky in New Jersey.
Milky Way as seen in New Jersey. Image taken with a Nikon D200 and 10.5 mm Fisheye Lens (f/2.8, 30 sec exposure)
Self Portrait while photographing a lunar eclipse in Boulder, Colorado.
Perseid Meteor Shower. I know that I said that I was going to go out to get more images of Clearwing Hummingbird moths, but the sky was finally clear last night and I had an opportunity to view the Perseid Meteor Shower. I set up two cameras on the back deck — a Nikon D4 camera with a 16 mm f/2.8 fisheye and a Nikon D800 camera with a 14-24 mm f/2.8 lens. Each was set to take 30 sec images (ISO 400, f/2.8). With the D800 camera and 14-24 lens I took the time to take a set of images to find out where I got the best focus for stars at infinity. For the 16 mm fisheye lens I just used infinity on the lens. This was a mistake. The images I got with the 14-24 lens where I spent the time to test the focus were a lot better, especially with the 32 MB sensor on the D800 camera.
The first image below is a single exposure with a meteor trail using the D800 & 14-24 mm lens. I really don’t understand the physics of other images on the internet of the Perseid Meteor Shower that show long exposures of the night sky (1-6 hours) that show multiple meteor trails where both the stars and the ground/landscape don’t move.
I have included several ~1 hour star trail images that are composites of the 30 second images (using the Startrails.exe program). The sky in New Jersey is not that dark, and the glow in the bottom of the image is the light from Princeton and Trenton. If you look close, several do show 1 or more meteor trails that were visible in New Jersey.
