Tag Archives: astrophotography

Oct 8, 2014 Lunar Eclipse

A co-worker happened to mention that this Lunar Eclipse was going to happen the next morning. I decided to get up early and see if I could capture some decent pictures. I used my Canon T3i and EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM with 2X extender mounted to a tripod. I found a place on top of a parking deck that happened to have one bank of lights turned off. The settings for this picture (click to enlarge) are: ISO 1250, F/5.6 and roughly 8/10″ exposure.

Right as the eclipse was reaching the peak clouds rolled in and I was unable to get the ending.

I am happy, but not thrilled with the pictures I took. I end up with a lot of noise and not as clear as I would like. There is software to help with this but I haven’t figured out how to use it yet, and this time I didn’t take the reference frames that would have helped. You might not be able to tell here but having the camera take as many pictures as I did resulted in a hot pixel that turned magenta. Next time…

Moon & Jupiter

Tonight is the full moon in my area. Also, Jupiter is right close by. I stacked two exposures to get this picture.

Here is a dimmer stack of just the moon

Mostly this was just a test of controlling the camera with my new phone. I didn't put the Bahtinov mask on so the focus is not as good as it could be. The set up worked very well and I was able to adjust aperture, ISO, shutter & focus all without having to bump the camera around. After I get a little more experience I'll describe it in more detail.

Moon – November 19, 2012

Here is a quick image stack of the moon using Registax 6. I used a 1.5 min video. I don't know how to use the program very well so I'm not sure if the problems are from that or my camera settings.
Here is a shot using just the manual settings. The exposure is much better here but there isn't as much detail.

Here is a shot with several manual shots stacked.