This image is noisy and blurry, but it does contain a whole galaxy! This is approximately what you see through relatively small 8×40 binoculars when you go looking for the Andromeda Galaxy, which you can see here as a blurry, foggy spot at the top left corner of a slightly misshapen rectangle. It’s actually not hard to find, but I’ve never been able to photograph it up to now – thanks to the more light sensitive sensor and screen of my new camera I was now able to locate it and at least capture it a little bit. Everything else I leave to the semi-professionals like Paul Hutchinson, who recently brilliantly captured Andromeda.

Once again, this is too wobbly – I think I was breathing on the camera or something. But it’s a nice 128-second capture of the ISS from the pass about one hour ago with lots of star trails in the background.

Two days ago, I captured the ISS for the first time in almost two months – still low in the southeast, but this 128-second exposure doesn’t look bad at all. I don’t know why it brightened so suddenly, but the streaks on the left are actually reflections from the balcony lamps I was too lazy to turn off. I could have edited them out, but let’s pretend it’s a cool lens flare :-).

Yesterday’s startrail long-exposure experiment. Five exposures with 256 seconds each fused together, but unfortunately I didn’t think of using the intervalometer, so there are gaps between each exposure and the camera was a bit wobbly sometimes. I did some startrails before, but this was my first try capturing the constellations revolving around the pole star and I didn’t want to just throw this attempt away. I know I can do it better, and if the weather permits I’ll try it again soon!

The moon, 22nd and 24th July. I’m not sure why the size difference is so pronounced, since it’s same camera at the same zoom level (Canon Powershot S5, 12x). But I like to give the moon a contrast push to get the seas to show up more, especially when it’s near full and there are not so many craters visible.

The moon is not up yet, so this is from two days ago… but it’s still the 44th anniversary of the first moon landing of Apollo 11 today. Original size, but a different processing method, looking a bit smoother.

I didn’t get my supermoon, but at least a moon with some nice craters yesterday.
100% size, all that’s possible with my camera.

Tonight was the last chance to see the ATV-4 before it docks to the ISS tomorrow, but it was not dark enough to see it. Even this ISS pass was hard to get – with 128 seconds exposure the sky got very bright, but at f/8 it still worked out as a blue sky version. It’s still a bit wobbly, but not as bad as the last one!

Another futile attempt to get a trail of the ATV-4 Albert Einstein space transporter. I saw it, but my camera doesn’t seem to like it and just exposed 15 seconds instead of 64 and didn’t even save a RAW – I think there’s a bug in CHDK somewhere. But with a little bit of filtering I was able to at least somewhat bring the trail out. Maybe I’ll get lucky tonight when if the weather holds…

The “I need a new tripod” capture of yesterday evening’s ISS flyover. I thought the camera was steady, but in spite of the slightly wobbly trail it’s a nice photo with the station vanishing in the clouds.