Observing conditions have been in short supply over the past few weeks, but on the rare occasions where the skies have cleared I’ve been lucky enough to see a few more noctilucent clouds. The shot above, taken at 01:46 BST this morning, shows a Type 4 O NCL (with an angular distance of 15°) weaving it’s delicate strands across the sky. Although this particular display wasn’t as intense, or vivid when compared to my first phenomenal sighting near the end of June; it was a wondrous scene to behold nonetheless.
Tags: DSLR, Noctilucent Clouds
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Glancing from the window early on Thursday morning (00:48 BST) I was confronted with a beautiful, and equally mind bending atmospheric display as noctilucent clouds streaked there way across the northern sky. These elusive clouds, which consist of water ice crystals some 0.1 micron in diameter, are found in a tenuous atmospheric layer known as the mesosphere. Illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon, which is scattered by the ice crystals, they become visible; appearing to glow with a ghostly pale blue colour.
It was a truly mesmerizing sight that almost begged belief. I feel very lucky to have finally observed, and photographed these ‘wraith’ clouds. Hopefully the next few months will yield similar if not better conditions!
Noctilucent clouds sweep across the constellations of Auriga, and Perseus. Capella can be seen shining brightly towards the lower left hand corner, while Mirphak, and Delta Persei can be seen in the upper right hand corner.
The constellation Auriga disappears behind a rippling swathe of vivid Type 5 IIIb NCLs, while the outer arm of a large cumulus cloud begins to drift over the sky.
The incredible, and intricate detail in the wave like structure of these ethereal clouds can be seen here as they outshine the bright star Capella.
A firey red Sun casts it’s light on to a large cumulus cloud as it drifts over the roof tops. At the same time some fainter NCLs spread their glowing arms across the sky leading to a very surreal scene.
Tags: Auriga, Capella, DSLR, Mirphak, Noctilucent Clouds, Perseus
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For a brief time on Thursday evening the clouds melted away and allowed the blue sky to shine through unsubdued. Making the most of the opportunity I got out and took some wide field shots of the rising gibbous Moon. As I did so, the remaining clouds played across the sky and helped (I think) add a sense of depth to these two shots.
The two exposures above were taken in JPEG mode at 1/80th of a second using a focal length of 70mm with an f/stop of 5.6 and an ISO of 100. Both images were then processed in Photoshop CS2 where I adjusted the white balance, applied some mild noise reduction and used two soft light layers to increase the contrast. All though I like both shots, for me the first one is my favorite - there’s a certain scale and intimacy to it that really does grab me.
We’re due for another perigee Moon (the point of closest approach) on Saturday evening, so fingers crossed that the weather will be kind and allow me to get back out to do some imaging. Here’s hoping!
Tags: DSLR, Moon, Perigee Moon, Weather
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With the Moon due to occult the Pleiades star cluster, Wednesday evening promised a celestial show like no other. Unfortunately for me the weather had other plans and for most of the day the sky was dominated by a blanket of altostratus cloud that later thinned out somewhat and allowed me a fleeting glimpse of the hazy Moon. It was through these ethereal, episodic breaks in the cloud that I managed the shot above.
Not the most impressive of pictures I have to admit, it’s a 4 second exposure that was shot at 70mm using an f/stop of 8 with an ISO of 100. There’s even a vague hint of a lunar corona in there, but it’s not going win a prize anytime soon. The weather showed no signs of abating and eventually the Moon was completely lost under a relentless carpet of cloud, bringing my very brief session to a close.
Tags: DSLR, Lunar Corona, M45, Moon, The Pleiades, Weather
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It has been a few months since I have tried my hand at another star trail shot, so as Monday night turned to Tuesday morning I decided to head back out and do just that. The temperature was now -8°C and a white, crisp frost had settled on everything, but the sky was so clear it begged believe. The first task was to set the camera up and focus on infinity, which I do by using a distant street light as a reference point. I wanted to capture the sweeping circular motion of the stars, so I aimed the camera on the tail of Ursa Major, made some final setting checks and framed the shot. As a last precaution I ran some test shots just to make sure that I was focused on infinity. With everything checking out okay I began snapping off exposures.
The resulting image that you can see above is a combination of 43×30 second exposures taken at 18mm using an f/stop of 4.5 with an ISO of 400. I had planned on taking 60 exposures in an effort to lengthen the trails, but unfortunately some altocumulus clouds decided to drift into my field of view from the north west as I was nearing exposure number 50. This meant that some of the shots were “spoiled” and had to be dropped at the processing stage.
As star trail images go it’s not great, but it’s not too bad either. What I really need to do is figure out how I can set the camera to take continuous 30 second exposures without having to manually hit the remote switch. This would mean I could get more exposures as well as spend some of the time observing while the camera does it’s thing. Finding a simple solution to this problem would definitely take the stress out of my star trail sessions but until then I’ll have to continue with my method of manually exposing shots.
Tags: DSLR, Star Trails, Ursa Major
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