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 »

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 another Moon attempt from two days ago before the horrible weather came!

No Moon shots due to clouds today or on the 20th, but yesterday I had a chance before the nasty weather came – so here’s an almost full Moon from last evening!

Another “Blue Moon”, this time from January 19.

I was a bit on a roll before the cloudy weather hit – so here’s another
Moon from January 18, with a blue sky in the background for a change!

More Moon and more craters from January 17. For those that tune in here for the first time: my Moon photos are not taken through a telescope, only with a modest Canon Powershot SX1 at 20x zoom (560mm in 35mm terms). At 10mp resolution, this allows an image size of only about 600×600 pixels, but I still love to try it once in a while because it’s amazing how much detail you can pick up with such a relatively “little” camera. Each photo is made up of about 15-20 stacked frames combined with Registax to get rid of the camera noise and bring out more detail. Final tweaking was done in Paint Shop Pro X with a bit of contrast and brightness balancing and a highpass filter in addition to Registax’ Wavelet sharpening. I wish I had a camera with an even more powerful zoom so I could get even closer, though!

This is not the first Moon of 2016 – that was on January 1 right in the first hours of the year, but this photo from two days ago is the first time we’ve had a look at the Moon since then.

This is not really a good photo, but more an experiment I tried several times before: can a Canon Powershot SX1 bridge camera pick up Jupiter’s moons? Yes, it can – they may be blurry, but you can definitely see all four Galilean Moons on this photo made on January 1 at about 2:15am. Jupiter itself is grossly overexposed and the camera is not even able to resolve any detail from the planet, but it’s still astonishing that it is possible to pick up the Galilean Moons with it.

The second leftover Moon photo from December 29 – and this one had some cracking craters!