UKC

I came so close but the sodding clouds got in the way, again.

Why is it so hard to capture a setting moon?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52548457561/in/dateposted/

Aside from the cloud issue, I assume you're using the Photographer's ephemeris to find a good landscape?

Similar. Photopills.

I have another bite of the cherry tomorrow morning. Hopefully the sunrise does not cause too many problems with the moon setting.

Worth getting up extra early as the moon will occult mars sometime around 10 to 5.  Clear skies forecast for tonight in South Lanarkshire so I'm intending to be imaging the orion nebula from around midnight.  Might just stay up for the occultation then sleep while I'm meant to be working. 

more likely to have clouds in the way nearer horizon as the thickness of atmosphere increases? Photopills app any good? 

I would highly recommend Photopills as it has an awful lot of useful features. My fave is the Augmented Reality of using the phone screen to show you where the sun will set on the image in front of you.

I’d second Lemming’s comment. I’ve only just bought it and used very few of the features, but I find it amazing. I love that you can save plans. Well worth a tenner.

I like it just the way it is.

Not exactly at moonset.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52549386861/in/dateposted/

Thanks, looks like I’m up for an early start tomorrow 😏📷

During tonight the moon eclipses Mars

Looking forward to tomorrow morning, clouds permitting, as the sun will be up and the moon won't be against a black sky.

Fingers crossed.

Good luck with that! You'll have a full moon in your face!

I have along standing project to get a better image of Barnard's Loop (same region of the sky) but I'm not even bothering to get the gear out tonight. Narrow-band imaging is about all it's good for. Why is it that we seem to get clear skies just at full moon?

A timelapse of Marsset-over-Moon might be cool though. 5am though!

A full moon can help with lighting up the landscape. This was taken during a full moon.

https://flic.kr/p/2mYgqnU

This morning, the sun rose 15 minutes too early and bleached out the moon just as it hit the horizon.

Got these though.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52550934915/in/dateposted/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52550944310/in/photostream/

Yep. Couple of subs of Andromeda were nearly a complete whiteout.  Switched to the other side of the sky for the Elephant's trunk nebula and that was pretty much the same. In the end I swapped cameras and took a few 30 second videos of the full moon to stack sometime tonight.  looked out of the window at 4am and we were clouded over so I missed the occultation.

The dog wanted a piss at 4am and it was cloudy for me as well.

However I have to say I have had a play filming the moon and stacking the images and got some good results. Only done this a couple of times though.

At least I've worked out the magic time window to try and capture a moonset of 30 minutes before sunrise to 15 minutes after sunrise.

This gives me five bites of the cherry till March. All weather dependant though.

Jan 5th

Feb 3rd and 4th

March 5th and 6th.

Yeh, a full Moon is worse than any upward light pollution for washing out the whole sky.

I got one of Mars just disappearing behind the Moon. But I cheated: I was curious last night if Mars would get lost in the glare of the full Moon, so I took a shot about 10ish and then just 'moved' Mars into the glare round the Moon. It would have been fine (surprised me a bit), but as other have said, the clouds came in about 4ish (no dog so I had to provide the piss myself), so glad not to have set an alarm. Clear again tonight, but not sure what to do with it...

You do this with Jupiter. It's moons are reasonably well arranged at the moment and come out quite nicely (as do Jupiter's bands) with the 100-400 lens (at 400mm). I also found that stacking a bunch of raw stills works better than starting with a movie. Oh and you have to expose differently for the moons and for Jupiter.

I shall give Jupiter a crack tonight. Any tips and advice on how to execute this would be very much appreciated.

I think I'll go down the raw images idea.

Cheers

Depends on the camera / scope/ lens you're using.  If it was me, I'd attach my planetary camera to my 150mm refractor - either screwed to the flattener or more likely with a nosepiece and 2x barlow (the 3x is rubbish cos of bad seeing and a reluctance to come to focus without extra extension tubes on the focus tube).  

Once focussed I use Sharpcap to capture a string of videos - maybe 30 - 50 seconds. Put the resulting AVI file into Autostakkert to stack maybe the best half of the frames then put the resulting Tiff into Registax for tweaking.  I've not done much planetary / lunar / solar imaging so I'm still getting to grips with the process.  Galaxies and nebulae are similar although I use a totally different suite of software (and I'm stacking 5 minute exposures instead of milliseconds). 

I only have a MFT camera and 100-400mm lens.

I've got a teeny tiny Dobson and camera mount but that's wobbly as hell.

I just had a look on TPE and sunrise was 45 minutes before moon set this morning, with the sun rising over the flatlands of the Fylde for you, so you don’t get any hills hiding the rising sun unfortunately. Nice photos anyway.

Good moonset this morning on Lismore. Crisp with frost down to the shoreline. Attempted to capture the screen but failed miserably.🙄

From my notes...

• Use Bahtinov mask to focus (manual) on star. Use remote control to avoid disturbing camera.
• Use 'silent' mode (mirror slap can be a problem)
• f6.3 1/250s ISO800 for Jupiter
• f6.3 1/4s ISO800 for moons
• Take at least 50-100 raw images (remote or timelapse mode) of each.
• Use PIPP to create AVI. Optimise for 'Planetary'.
• Use AutoStakkert to select best frames and stack.
• Use Registax for Wavelet post-processing.

You can use Registax for the stacking, but it's not as good. Don't try stacking full size raw images with Registax (hence PIPP) - it all goes horribly wrong!

There's another tool which will compensate (geometrically) for Jupiter's rotations, but I can't remember it name Probably don't need it at this stage.

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice which I will adapt for my mirrorless camera.

As for Bahtinov masks, can any Bahtinov be used or do I need one specific to the diameter of my lens?

Just going off your timings. I'd have guessed that you would want a longer exposure for Jupiter and then shorted exposures for the moons. Or do you need longer because they are so small and give off less light?

Mine's a G9 so mirrorless too.

Not to critical: I made my own, fits most my relevant lenses. About 1mm line with 1mm gaps. Work well from 100mm to 400mm focal length.

The latter. The moons are quite faint (smaller than a pixel), but Jupiter is bright.

Also: This is useful...

https://shallowsky.com/galilean/

My GH6 is pitiful with night time photography. How do you eek the best out of your sensor. My GH5 was also just as awful.

This is a stacked attempt from a Time Lapse project, and the only one that I am remotely happy with, noise wise.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/the1lemming/52383189592/in/dateposted/

Jupiter isn't really 'astro' since it's daytime bright, so the G9 (and therefore GH5) is fine.

I'm still working on getting the best out of it for deep-sky images - it's has horrible fixed pattern noise, but 'darks' (in DSS) seem to do a decent job there. I'm also getting some weird colour shift (relative to daylight). I managed this image of M33 last month without too much effort*...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/2PTWgsBFQ65UM9Xp8

... so I'll keep trying. My main motivation is that the 100-400 lens is surprisingly good at 400mm and there no way I'm getting 800mm focal length on a 6d without spending money.

* The longer FL is forcing me to do some mods to my tracker to get the (unguided) precision to the 1 arcsecond per minute level. All good fun though on cloudy nights!

This was what I manage with Jupiter...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Vu7FxRLUYKWnz72H9

... and I had a go at Saturn (plus Titan & Rhea), but that's really pushing it...

https://photos.app.goo.gl/QoXn9iHBYyQ32boL7

Still, not bad given it's just ordinary camera/lens - no astro-specific equipment at all.

Winjupos

Us m43 users are always going to struggle with low light .

There are trade-offs though. There's no way I'm getting an 800mm f6.3 for my 6d! So you have to make the best use of what you've got.

why aren't more affordable refractor telescopes used instead of super expensive telephoto lenses? eg was thinking of something like this..

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/reviews/telescopes/sky-watcher-evostar-7...

For me at least it's an issue of utility: I only expect to get ~10 dark clear nights a year so I'm loathed to spend too much money on astro-only stuff. So I just aim to see what I can do with my 'every day' photo gear or my wife's birding setup (G9 + 100-400) which get's out pretty much every weekend. I think the only astro-specific stuff I bought are some light pollution interference filters which aren't the sort of thing you can bodge in the garage.

The other thing is that with a 'telescope', unless it's an expensive 'astrograph' you also need to buy a 'field flattener' if you want your images to be sharp across the whole frame and they're another couple of hundred quid. All in all, a reasonable* 800mm FL refractor + flattener will cost almost the same as a good long tele zoom lens (like the Leica 100-400). And get a lot less use.

* Full frame image circle for use with 6d

Could you even hold it single handed and take an image?

Smug face on. 😀