A single shot from below the area I was overlooking from the sports hall in the previous photos. I never realized I could get both the sports hall and the supermarket building into one shot until I tried this!
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Sometimes the Schlumbergera Cactus Blossoms almost seem translucent.

The only other kind of astrophotography I can do with my cameras is long exposures and combined with watching the International Space Station flying over at night, it makes fascinating photos. This involves finding out when the station is coming with websites like Heavens Above and then using the addon-firmware CHDK to persuade the camera to take exposures longer than 15 seconds. The Powershot S2 and S5 I used in 2012 and 2013 had quite a bit of sensor glow when I pushed them to 60 or even 120 seconds, but the SX1 has proven to be much better in that respect. I haven’t taken a lot of those photos over the last couple of years, but I’ve collected them all in the three galleries linked below. Click on the preview photo above to go to the 2015 gallery or the links below for the others – and for annotated photos, you can check out the single posts in the ISS & Co blog category. There’s also a G+ version with all images in one album over on my Google+ Profile or the Astrophotography Collection.

« ISS 2012 » | « ISS 2013 » | « ISS 2014/15 »

Here’s another panorama to the East of the previous one, covering the area of the upper Kämpchenstrasse left of the sports hall. In the summer you usually can’t see much from here because of the trees, but here you can see the middle school with its distinctive towe, the buildings of the trade school and the adjoining kindergarten peeking through. Plus lots of empty parking lots!
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This one looks like it’s ready to fly off!

More bare branches – also, I’m not going to write a comment
for each photo from now, they should be largely self-explanatory.

After watching the skies for planes, let’s do some amateur astrophotography – the Moon 2015 album has all the Moon shots from last year, which turned out to be a lot. We often had clear skies and the Powershot SX1 proved to be quite good even though the combination of a 20x zoom and 10 megapixels still only allows a full moon size of about 550-600 pixels in diameter. But it’s a distinct improvement over the S5 and with some careful stacking of several images using Registax it’s possible to get a surprising amount of detail. Click on the preview photo above or the link below to go to the gallery, but you can also find a G+ version over on my Google+ Profile or the Astrophotography Gallery Collection – but the gallery on my own webspace has the advantage of having uncompressed PNG images.

« MOON 2015 »

Here’s an almost 180-degree panorama of the area I covered in the previous couple of photos. A sizeable portion of this neighbourhood and even much more is visible: on the far left there’s a glimpse of the older houses of the Kaiserstrasse and both highrises on the former army barracks area are there, with the inner city highrises peeking through in the background. On the far right are the middle school with its distinctive tower and the houses of the Kämpchenstrasse. The lighting conditions were not really good that day, so part of the panorama is a little bit overexposed – but it still looks good enough, I think.
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Another backlit Cactus Flower – there are still a few shots left!