Wow, here is it more than a year since our trip to Death Valley National Park and I am still able to get photo posts out of our journey. This post chronicles our visit to The Devil’s Golf Course.

This expanse of eroded rock salt is quite a sight. You reach the area, located just a few miles north of Badwater Basin, via a quarter mile dirt road that was well maintained when we visited. You find yourself in the midst of cracked and craggy salt chunks.

The formation itself really is just salt. You can clearly see the crystals that have formed from ages of evaporation.

Our view around the valley was amazing, with snow-covered Telescope Peak to the west. This panorama shows the breadth of the view. Click on the picture for a bigger view.

I was out in the desert a few weeks ago right at the new Moon. I took advantage of the dark skies to take some wide field shots of the Milky Way, which is right overhead at dusk this time of year.

I aligned and combined the images in PixInsight where I also removed some light pollution gradients. I finished the images in Lightroom. I took the images with my Sony RX-100 V on a iOptron sky-tracker tracking camera mount.

This first image is a composite of three, three-minute exposures. The RX100 does a noise reduction routine that takes as long as the exposure, so I find that the six minutes required for each three-minute exposure works well for me. The image was taken looking northwest. The fuzzy spot on the right is the Andromeda Galaxy, or Messier 31. The Double Cluster is visible on the right, just a little lower than the Andromeda Galaxy, just below the constellation Cassiopeia. Click on the image for a full-sized version.

The second image is a two image composite, also three minutes each. It is almost overhead, but looking toward the west. Vega is the bright star in the lower left, with the constellation Cygnus anchored by Deneb in the center of the image. The dashed line at the lower left is an airplane that passed through the frame.

I am happy to have some astrophotos here in the blog after many months, particularly given that this is nominally a website dedicated to astronomy!

After more years than I care to admit, the observatory is operational again. With support from a fellow enthusiast, I spent the time over Labor Day weekend to sort out all of my PC driver issues and get the computer speaking to the mount, telescope, focuser, rotator, and camera. Gathering data on the long weekend and mid-month, I was able to get this image of NGC 7331.

NGC 7331 is 40 million light years from Earth. The smaller galaxies in the lower part of the image are approximately 10 times farther away and so this is not a gravitationally bound group. The common name for this group is the Deer Lick Group. I imaged this galaxy group on my Celestron C-11 in 2011, with my Televue NP-101 in a wide view in 2009, and it was one of my early targets with the C-11 in 2006. The 2006 image was taken from West Los Angeles. All of the others were taken from my observatory in Lake Riverside. (Please note that the company and product names are separate links so you can find out both about their current products as well as my older ones.)

This image (that’s a link to my gallery) consists of 230 minutes of total exposure time: 110 minutes of luminance (all colors) and 40 minutes each of red, green, and blue. All of the data was collected in 5 minute exposures and combined using the LRGB method to create this final image. If you are interested, I wrote a post in 2017 that describes how these exposures are cleaned up and turned into a final image.

The data was captured on an SBIG ST-10, my workhorse CCD camera for almost 15 years. The telescope is a Planewave CDK 12.5 reflector. It is mounted on an Astro-Physics AP-1200 mount. The data were captured using Maxim DL, orchestrated by CCD Commander. My observatory software is The Sky X. For focusing, I use FocusMax.

The journey to this image was not smooth. We had three nights of imaging time over the Labor Day weekend. I used the first to get everything connected and calibrated. On the second, I captured data. My general order of imaging on a rising object (NGC 7331 was rising in the east when I took the data) is red, green, blue, then luminance. I was surprised that the blue filter seemed to be producing the brightest images when that should be the luminance filter. I realized on the third imaging night that I had my filter order incorrect and that, in fact, what I had set up as the blue filter was actually the luminance filter. So that final night I took almost two hours of data through the “blue” filter.

After poking around on my old computer and with different software, I determined the correct filter order. But there was another problem. The color data were very poor, and my calibration frames (see the data reduction post) were very poor. I was able to get back out to the observatory later in September and take a new set of color data. That was married with the not blue but luminance data in PixInsight to create this final image.

I am very happy to have the observatory operating again. Without the moral support of the friend who helped me while he got his imaging working, I’d have put it off again. It’s great to have a real deep-space image back in the blog and the gallery.

I’ve been taking photos for years, starting in middle school and continuing to today. I spent years working on black and white photos in the darkroom and really loved the control one has to control how your photos look. The birth of digital photography has brought that joy back. With great tools like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, I can crop, adjust contrast, and tweak however I’d like. I can even “cheat” by removing unwanted items from a photo (although I do that sparingly: One must protect the integrity of the image unless one just calls it “art”).

At this point, I have about 9,500 pictures in my Lightroom catalog, going back about three years. I find there are some I really like. So I thought, which one of these would I want to publish as postcards or in a calendar? That is the subject of this post. To share some of my photographs that I particularly like. This does not include any of my astrophotos, I focused solely on terrestrial photography. Selecting the photos was difficult. My original culling left me with over 30 photos. The standard I learned in the 1980s was that a National Geographic photographer would take 20,000 photos to print 15, so quantity enables quality.

As it is, I am still imposing 10 of my photos on you. So I hope you like them. And forgive my vanity in posting them.

The first is a real favorite. Just a bird on a rock, but all the subtle grays and sky really are nice. Taken at McCarty’s Cove in Marquette, Michigan.

McCarty’s Cove, Marquette. Michigan

We had a road trip earlier this year and I took a ton of photos at the Grand Canyon. We were lucky to have storms to liven up the view.

Grand Canyon and storms from Pima Point

This ore dock in downtown Marquette, Michigan has been out of use since the mid 1970s. It used to deliver chunk ore as opposed to the processed pellets used today. There was a railroad bridge that extended over downtown to the dock in the front of the picture, so now this really looks like a relic.

The downtown Marqueete iron ore dock,, once used to load iron ore on ships

Living in Southern California, we “visit” the snow. What a change from when I lived with it. I like the subtle tones and shapes in this image.

Fog and snow near Idylwild, California

High clouds, dusk, fall, what else does one need?

Tree and rock in Lake Riverside

This is a temple in Telakadu, India. I like how the interior is indirectly illuminated by the bright sunlight.

The interior is quite pretty

Matheran, India is a hill station — a mountain top resort — near Mumbai. We saw an amazing sunset there.

The sunset from Sunset Point, Matheran, India

This is a special woods trail for me. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, this picture is a classic early summer image of the woods.

The trail through the woods between Conway Lake and Lake Superior

Along the road from downtown Anacortes, Washington to the Washington State Ferry Terminal, there is a very active shipyard. Walking through it, it is clear that it has been active for a long time. This oil truck has no doubt been parked for an extended period.

A colorful old oil delivery truck.

Finally, a late afternoon picture from Hermit’s Rest at the Grand Canyon. I’ll admit I took 500 shots on the sunset tour alone. I was bracketing the exposures to get all the subtle tones and differences in brightness.

Sunset and storm over the Grand Canyon from Hermit’s Rest

Thanks for looking.

This post describes how one creates an astro-image like the one below. This will be a bit of a dry post. Let’s start start with the finished product, an image I took of Messier 81 in the constellation of Ursa Major, also known as Bode’s Galaxy.

I use the term “image” intentionally to contrast with “photo.” These images are the result of capturing data on a CCD through a telescope in multiple long exposures. They are not photos. These data need to be processed to become the pretty images we see. The image of M81 above used 3 hours 25 minutes of exposure time, taken in multiple 5-minute exposures with white light, red, green, and blue taken separately and processed as described below to create the final image.

The data are noisy. There are anomalies in the optical system like dust or uneven illumination though the telescope. Heat causes random charges to accumulate on a CCD during long exposures, even with the CCD chilled to -25°C. The CCD chip itself may have minor defects that generate differences in how photons are collected. The electronics introduce noise when data are read off the CCD and passed to the computer controlling the camera. Finally, the objects being imaged are very dim, so the signal we are trying to capture is small, just barely above the background glow of the sky.

Continue reading →

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I was able to get the iOptron Sky Tracker Pro out again and try some more wide field astrophotography. I learned (and should have known) that level is as important as polar alignment for good tracking. Having done most of my imaging with autoguiding which corrects for leveling and other mechanical errors, I did not level properly back in October and had a number of disappointing images. This night, however, turned out better.

I used my Sony RX-100 M4 camera to take the images, controlling the camera over WiFi using Sony’s PlayMemories Mobile software. This software allows complete control of the camera’s function from any iOS or Android device and is available from the respective app stores. [Please note that I am currently an employee of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Sony is the parent company of my employer.] This night, I used my iPad. I selected three targets: The Pleiades and the Double Cluster in Perseus, M31 — the galaxy in Andromeda, and the constellation Orion.

For each image, I used 15 second framing exposures. Focus was set to manual and at infinity. Once framed, I took longer images, settling on three minutes for my target exposure time. The camera performs a long-exposure noise reduction that lasts as long as the exposure. So a three minute exposure is six minutes of imaging time. I tried turning that off in my failed October attempt, but the remnant noise was not easily removed (I admit I have not experimented extensively with this, but I did get good results with camera long-exposure noise reduction turned on).

I captured all the images in Sony raw (.arw) format and imported them into Adobe Lightroom. I exported them in TIFF format and then processed them in PixInsight. In PixInsight, I performed background neutralization, color correction and balance, and some contrast adjustment. I imported the result back into Lightroom, did light touch-up and noise reduction to produce the final results.

The first image I took was of the Pleiades and the Double Cluster in Perseus. Two beautiful objects in a small telescope or with binoculars. This was a simple, three minute exposure. The Pleiades are on the right in the middle of the image, the Double Cluster is in the upper left, and the bright star in the lower left is Capella.

Please click on any of the images to be taken to the gallery and see a higher resolution image.

For my image of the Andromeda Galaxy, I did a bit more processing. I took one two minute exposure and a one minute exposure, combining them in PixInsight. I would have taken a three minute single exposure but it was cold and I wanted to get on to Orion. This image had the most processing in PixInsight. The galaxy is the fuzzy spot in the middle of the image.

The final image I took was of Orion, which was fairly low in the sky, not more than 40° above the horizon. I also zoomed the camera which reduced the f-ratio by one stop, from 1.4 to 2.4. Because of this, I took a four minute exposure. My only comment on the processing is that I think I may have clipped the blacks too much. I’ll try again when it is higher in the sky.

You can see the Nebula in Orion in the center right. Note that the two brightest stars are Betelgeuse and Rigel. Rigel is on the left, for you should always remember that Rigel is not red. If you zoom in to the lowest star in Orion’s belt (Alnitak) you can see a little red which is the Flame Nebula. I have an image of it in the gallery.

Comments are welcome and I hope you enjoy the images.

Since I haven’t taken the time to get the observatory up and running for quite a while, I have instead done some night photography with my Sony RX100. To that end, I acquired an iOptron Sky Tracker Pro tracking camera mount. It is a great device, complete with polar alignment scope and internal battery.

I took two nice Milky Way shots on my first night imaging on September 4th. The first shot is looking directly overhead. The bright star toward the top of the image is Vega, Deneb is near the mid point on the left, and Altair on the right. This is one three-minute exposure processed in Adobe Lightroom. (Lightroom is an absolutely amazing product.)

The second shot is in the south, with the galactic center in the middle of the frame. The three bright stars on the mid-right of the image are actually two planets and a star. Saturn is on the top, Mars on the left, and Antares under Saturn. This is also one three-minute exposure processed in Lightroom, with some obstruction removal in Photoshop.

Click on the images to be taken to the detail page in my photo gallery.

Just a short post this month. I am working on a much longer post documenting a great trip to Matheran in Maharashtra about 80 miles from Mumbai.

So, while that is in the works, enjoy this image of a crescent Moon taken from Lake Riverside in February.

Cottonwood and Moon